On version 0.66, Zim doesn't copy text to clipboard. You can copy/paste text inside Zim, but when you try to paste on notepad, notepad++, or any program other than Zim, Paste option is disabled.

Hello,

I am working on packaging Zim as native macOS application bundle. The goal is to produce

• a completely self-contained and relocatable app,
• supporting OS X Yosemite 10.10 to macOS Catalina 10.15
• without external dependencies (Homebrew, Python, ...),
• without the need for 3rd party launchers or wrappers and to
• distribute it as notarized disk image.

If this is of interest to you, I can offer to contribute macOS releases for the Zim project instead of doing this in a fork on the side. Let me know what you think.

First of all, thanks for a wonderful utility. I have been using Zim wiki since 2012 and absolutely love this utility. I am into education and have influenced several students to use it during their studies. We also use it in our company to check in information about company processes.

I started noticing performance issues around 2016 when the number of pages would have crossed 6000. I upgraded my laptop around this time (i7/16 GB RAM/SSD storage) and made a few hacks by disabling the index and only updating when I do an "Update Index". This served another 2 years.

Now, after 6 years and 12000 pages of heavily cross linked content, I am finding Zim almost unusable. It takes over 30 seconds to load and every page click freezes Zim for 10s of seconds before allowing me to view/edit. I would have happily moved on to some other solution, but unfortunately (and fortunately for Zim) there is no solution that serves my needs. I really love Backlinks and the automatic update of Backlinks when pages are moved around. This feature along with several other minute but well chosen features has made Zim the winner for me.

I am not sure if users like me would be supported in future, so I am thinking about alternatives. I find the lack of a web/mobile app sometimes crippling but I am prepared to let go of them for lack of a better solution. Google Keep/Evernote/One Note are not good enough when it comes to navigation at scale.

Is there anyway we can think of improving the performance of indexing so that users like me can continue using Zim? Is there some setting that can be added to prevent frequent index scans/updates and use them from a cache?

Related issues: https://github.com/jaap-karssenberg/zim-desktop-wiki/issues/182

I have tried deleting and re-creating the index - doesn't help. I believe the issue to be with the SQL queries on index and index updates.

Thanks again!

Gautham

First of all, thank you for a great program. I use it very often, to structure my notes and thoughts. But please, make the client side decorations optional! It looks horrendous on my Xfce4-desktop! Regards /M

When I create a code block on a page , switch to another page and switch back to the original page, the code block is misplaced in the display and overlap the surrounding text.

This does not happen with the first code block on the page, but with every subsequent block.

When clicking on the page, the click seems to happen on the expected position of the items, and not on the rendered display.

This happens on 0.7rc2 (rc1 as well) on linux with kde.

This is meant to be a starting point supporting links inside pages as requested in #978 . The changes allow creating links to headings as anchor point. Clicking onto a section heading offers 'Copy link to section" to ease the link creation process.

Hi,

I just switched from a ubuntu 18.04 machine to a MacBook Pro and noticed that Zim is very slow in comparison to running it on ubuntu.

I simply used brew install zim and created the launcher zim.app wrapper as described in the Zim Wiki page. Note that the zim version on brew is still 0.72.1, so I tried to just set up a custom python-environment and run sim from source. The problem is pretty much the same, so I don't think there is any difference from the zim version side.

I am wondering if someone else noticed these performance differences, or if someone can help me debug my problem.

Cheers

I have just installed Zim 0.74.3 using homebrew on OSX 10.15. I have tried to use the distraction free plugin with no success. When I press F11 I have no effect. Even from the menu-bar -->Fullscreen.

this adds a bullet journal back arrow to complements the already existing arrow for documenting the normal migration

the bullet journal method has 2 types of migration

• > migration which documents the move of a task not completed in the current day/log to a new day/log
• < migration, which documents the move of a task to a future collection for further refinement

as it affects both text syntax and integrated actions i saw no way of implementing this in a plugin

its possible to go on with just documenting everything as "normal migration" but that takes away information useful for reflection

TODO:

• [x] check wiki format version bump
• [x] mini intro for bujo
• [x] squash

Describe the bug When launching Zim in the current version of MacOS (Monterey 12.0.1), Python launches but there is no Zim window anywhere. I have tried adjusting the display resolution and that does not solve the problem. Zim had been working fine on the same machine previously. Terminal shows the error message 'WARNING: XDG_RUNTIME_DIR is not set...' I don't know if the problem was caused by the OS upgrade, or by some dependency being updated.

To Reproduce Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. Type 'zim' + ENTER from terminal command line.
2. notice an error message in the terminal: in my case, 'WARNING: XDG_RUNTIME_DIR is not set, using /var/folders/8_/jggm7f2950s9zf6qbjv0m_l00000gn/T/zim-user1 as a fallback'
3. notice that Python launches and the Zim menu appears at the top of the screen, but the actual Zim window never appears.
4. Select menu items that launch a new window, like 'View Debug Log' or 'Preferences'. Notice that the top bar of the window appears, but not the window itself.

Environment (please complete the following information):

• Version: 0.74.2
• OS: MacOS
• Language: English (US)

The side panes have no horizontal scroll bars. For example if there are many levels of documents within a Wiki the Index sidepane can not be scrolled sideways to show the lower levels. Instead the names of the lower levels are truncated with three dots at the end.

I think for large wikis (and I have quite a large one with more than 3000 partly nested pages) there should be the possibility to scroll the sidepanes not just vertically but also horizontally.

The only current option is to pull out the sidepanes and make them larger, which takes away from the usable space in the middle.

The attachment demonstrates that. The vertical scrollbar is visible. There is no horizontal scrollbar.

It affects Linux and Windows versions.

Describe the bug In Windows OS, any plugin has dependencies is failed to enable even the dependencies already in PATH.

To Reproduce

1. Windows OS
2. Install dependencies and make sure it is set in PATH
3. In Zim > Go to Preference to enable any plugins that require dependencies (for example "Insert diagram" which requires GraphViz)
4. Can't enable plugin as the dependencies is failed to load

Expected behavior Should allow to enable plugin as dependencies is available in PATH

Screenshots

Environment (please complete the following information):

• Version 0.75.1 (install as portable mode - not sure if that trigger the bug?)
• OS: Windows 10

Additional context Below is the code in Zim for lookup the dependences in PATH and it should see all the exe, bat... in PATH https://github.com/zim-desktop-wiki/zim-desktop-wiki/blob/2d2970fc136eb6baf00d62e8d7ad1e024e54dcab/zim/applications.py#L217-L224

Workaround: add a execution Windows Batch file (example dot.bat) to same folder of Zim will passed the dependencies requirement, however, there is another bug related to it as well in #2261

Describe the bug Reported by @Mike221223 in https://github.com/zim-desktop-wiki/zim-desktop-wiki/discussions/2264

To Reproduce Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. Create the pages shown below in Additional context
2. Export the pages as html and inspect the links
3. The links don't lead where they should; TL;DR: #section-a -> #new:ExportTest; +SubPage#anchor -> ./ExportTest_files/SubPage.html

Expected behavior Links in exports should behave as do in Zim

Environment (please complete the following information):

• Version 0.75.1 and latest develop commit (1dfdc48be1929715d2360af247a216df8cf3f3a9)
• OS: linux
• Language: en_US

Additional context

From a quick look into zim/formats/html.py's git history, it seems like dump_link hasn't been updated after the introduction of anchors, which IIRC was when linking to headings was introduced. This likely means that all export formats need to be reviewed in case of the same issue.

Related issues: https://github.com/zim-desktop-wiki/zim-desktop-wiki/discussions/1942, https://github.com/zim-desktop-wiki/zim-desktop-wiki/discussions/2256 - our HRef implementation could use a look over.

https://github.com/zim-desktop-wiki/zim-desktop-wiki/blob/1dfdc48be1929715d2360af247a216df8cf3f3a9/zim/formats/html.py#L211-L222

Non-exhaustive examples to reproduce

new:ExportText

====== ExportText ======

==== Section A ====

Add enough text here to require some scrolling

Here's a link: [[#section-a|Section A]]

Another one: [[+SubPage#anchor]]

new:ExportTest:SubPage

====== SubPage ======

Hi there {{id: anchor}}

[[#section-a|Section A]] becomes <a href="#new:ExportTest" title="Section A" class="page">Section A</a> (points to page path, not heading!), while [[+SubPage#anchor]] becomes <a href="./ExportTest_files/SubPage.html" title="+SubPage#anchor" class="page">+SubPage#anchor</a> (lacks the anchor).

Describe the bug When insert UML diagram, it will fail to generate image with error "The system cannot find the file specified" It is because Python has a problem to detect the command file with .bat extension

I believe it is this part in applications.py: https://github.com/zim-desktop-wiki/zim-desktop-wiki/blob/2d2970fc136eb6baf00d62e8d7ad1e024e54dcab/zim/applications.py#L294-L309

Should add shell = True to compatible for Windows? Reference of similar issue in another repo: https://github.com/mikitex70/plantuml-markdown/issues/11

To Reproduce

1. Windows OS, installed PlantUML, install PlantUML plugin (https://gitlab.com/Voyvode/zim-umldiagrameditor)
2. Has plantuml.bat in Zim application folder (so the plugin can call plantuml command)
3. In Zim, Insert an UML
4. Error "The system cannot find the file specified"

Logs:

INFO: Running: ('plantuml', 'C:\\Zim\\tmp\\zim-zizy_qsp\\umldiagram.png', 'C:\\Zim\\tmp\\zim-zizy_qsp\\umldiagram.puml') (cwd: None)
DEBUG: Running ErrorDialog
DEBUG: The system cannot find the file specified

Expected behavior Should no error and able to execute command of bat file.

Screenshots

Environment (please complete the following information):

• Version 0.75.1 with installed PlantUML plugin (https://gitlab.com/Voyvode/zim-umldiagrameditor)
• OS: Windows 10
• In Zim application folder has plantuml.bat file to execute plantuml.

Opened per @introt's request in https://github.com/zim-desktop-wiki/zim-desktop-wiki/issues/2167#issuecomment-1358083722. Details in in https://github.com/zim-desktop-wiki/zim-desktop-wiki/issues/1497#issuecomment-1358082581 or https://github.com/zim-desktop-wiki/zim-desktop-wiki/issues/2167#issuecomment-1358082355 (same details in both).

Duplicated here for quick reference.

tl;dr: If Zim is very slow or if the spell checker is misbehaving, try removing gtkspellcheck and using gtkspell instead. For Ubuntu, Mint, etc.:

• sudo apt purge python3-enchant python3-gtkspellcheck
• sudo apt install gir1.2-gtkspell3-3.0 libgtkspell3-3-0
• sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jaap.karssenberg/zim && sudo apt update && sudo apt install zim

Details:

I've had various problems with the spell checker (which I require :), e.g. #2167, #1497, and maybe #1596, which I believe all started with the move to Python3. I've the same problems on multiple machines, running Mint-19.x, 20.x and 21.0, with various resources. In particular, they persisted when I built a brand new 16 core Ryzen 7 which should not present any performance problems. Related to performance, note I do keep Zim wiki files on a remote SSH FileSystem mount, but it's a local 1G LAN.

I had the "ah ha" moment when I build a brand new Mint-21.0 VM for work, installed Zim from PPA, and it Just Worked Great, with none of the problems. When I looked into it, I saw "Edit > Preferences > Plugins > Spell Checker: gtkspell - OK (gtkspellcheck - Failed)". Meanwhile, all the bad ones had "gtkspellcheck - OK" I assume for some historical reason or other. When I switched a bad one from gtkspellcheck to gtkspell all the problems went away!

I did not specifically install either gtkspellcheck or gtkspell on this new VM, so I assume that gtkspell is (now?) the default somewhere. So I am thinking that the move to Python3 somehow broke gtkspellcheck in a Zim context? And maybe since gtkspell seems to be the default now, that's why most folks don't have this problem?

This also explains why turning spell checking off (#1497) "fixes" the problem.

Zim automatic creation of pages and they cannot be deleted

The fact that they cannot be deleted just makes the problem more annoying. But I just want to turn off this highly undesirable feature. Everyone I know who uses Zim is annoyed by it, and it's a strange aspect of open source software that I keep seeing, that developers like features but 99% of users don't, but they stay in the software. I would be willing to change a certain line of code after each update or something like that but how can I just stop that please? the problem has existed for about 4 years and on various computers and various versions of zim.
Why every mail address and every URL does not become a new - unwanted - sub page is not clear to me - so I cannot describe the reproduction exactly but I think the problem is known. i would like to stay with zim and am looking forward to a reply

Description Somehow it happend that Zim's automatic link-generation produced a faulty link with the resulting source code: [[ #zim-pageview| ''#zim-pageview'']]

Simplifying the faulty link: [[ #test]]

Please note the leading space before the hash in the link part of the code.

Reproduction Copy this to the source code of a Zim page to reproduce the problem.

Annotation I know this is not a valid link and should not appear. But I managed it somehow that the auto-linking of Zim produced the first link while copy/pasting the verbatim marked text. This shall be an issue for another bug report, as currently I cannot reproduce it.

The reported and reproducible issue is that the handling of the invalid link generates an error dialog with a traceback.

Commented Debug Information

Handling the faulty link resulted in more errors and tracebacks as it has been visible to me at the first glance:

1. When just hovering over the link, the typical bubble note with the link destination does not appear.

This is the debug output of the hover action:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/zim/notebook/page.py", line 153, in makeValidPageName
    Path.assertValidPageName(newname)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/zim/notebook/page.py", line 139, in assertValidPageName
    raise AssertionError('Not a valid page name: %s' % name)
AssertionError: Not a valid page name: 

During handling of the above exception, another exception occurred:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/zim/gui/pageview/__init__.py", line 6222, in on_link_enter
    href = HRef.new_from_wiki_link(link['href'])
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/zim/notebook/page.py", line 375, in new_from_wiki_link
    names = Path.makeValidPageName(href.lstrip('+')) if href else ""
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/zim/notebook/page.py", line 155, in makeValidPageName
    raise ValueError('Not a valid page name: %s (was: %s)' % (newname, name))
ValueError: Not a valid page name:  (was:  )
Error in sys.excepthook:
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/apport_python_hook.py", line 153, in apport_excepthook
    with os.fdopen(os.open(pr_filename,
FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/var/crash/_usr_bin_zim.1000.crash'

Original exception was:
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/zim/notebook/page.py", line 153, in makeValidPageName
    Path.assertValidPageName(newname)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/zim/notebook/page.py", line 139, in assertValidPageName
    raise AssertionError('Not a valid page name: %s' % name)
AssertionError: Not a valid page name: 

During handling of the above exception, another exception occurred:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/zim/gui/pageview/__init__.py", line 6222, in on_link_enter
    href = HRef.new_from_wiki_link(link['href'])
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/zim/notebook/page.py", line 375, in new_from_wiki_link
    names = Path.makeValidPageName(href.lstrip('+')) if href else ""
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/zim/notebook/page.py", line 155, in makeValidPageName
    raise ValueError('Not a valid page name: %s (was: %s)' % (newname, name))
ValueError: Not a valid page name:  (was:  )
DEBUG: Activate link:  #text
ERROR: Exception during activate-link((' #text', {'new_window': False}))
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/zim/notebook/page.py", line 153, in makeValidPageName
    Path.assertValidPageName(newname)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/zim/notebook/page.py", line 139, in assertValidPageName
    raise AssertionError('Not a valid page name: %s' % name)
AssertionError: Not a valid page name: 

3. When doing a click with the left mouse button on the link, an error dialog appears but no change in the page presentation.

The debug output for the left-click:

During handling of the above exception, another exception occurred:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/zim/gui/pageview/__init__.py", line 6610, in do_activate_link
    self._do_activate_link(link, hints)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/zim/gui/pageview/__init__.py", line 6619, in _do_activate_link
    href = HRef.new_from_wiki_link(link)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/zim/notebook/page.py", line 375, in new_from_wiki_link
    names = Path.makeValidPageName(href.lstrip('+')) if href else ""
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/zim/notebook/page.py", line 155, in makeValidPageName
    raise ValueError('Not a valid page name: %s (was: %s)' % (newname, name))
ValueError: Not a valid page name:  (was:  )
DEBUG: Running ErrorDialog

The error dialog contained the identical traceback and additionally these details:

This is zim 0.75.1
Platform: posix
Locale: en_US UTF-8
FS encoding: utf-8
Python: (3, 8, 10, 'final', 0)
PyGObject: (3, 36, 0)

Some more details to the system with the error:

Zim package: the Debian package of Zim from your website (zim_0.75.1_all.deb).
The system is an Ubuntu 20.4 LTS based LinuxMint 20.3

4. When doing a click with the right mouse button on that link the object window appears with the choice for actions reduced to a minimum: [Cut|Copy|Paste|Paste As Verbatim|Delete|<Separator>|Select all|Insert Emoji] Missing are all the link-specific entries: [Open|Open in a new Window|<Separator>|Cut Link|Copy Link|Edit Link|Remove Link] Also some entries are missing that are available for regular text and links: [Copy as ...|Copy link to this location|Move selected Text ...]

This debug output appears when doing the right-click:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/zim/notebook/page.py", line 153, in makeValidPageName
    Path.assertValidPageName(newname)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/zim/notebook/page.py", line 139, in assertValidPageName
    raise AssertionError('Not a valid page name: %s' % name)
AssertionError: Not a valid page name: 

During handling of the above exception, another exception occurred:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/zim/gui/pageview/__init__.py", line 6679, in do_populate_popup
    self._default_do_populate_popup(menu)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/zim/gui/pageview/__init__.py", line 6828, in _default_do_populate_popup
    href = HRef.new_from_wiki_link(link['href'])
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/zim/notebook/page.py", line 375, in new_from_wiki_link
    names = Path.makeValidPageName(href.lstrip('+')) if href else ""
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/zim/notebook/page.py", line 155, in makeValidPageName
    raise ValueError('Not a valid page name: %s (was: %s)' % (newname, name))
ValueError: Not a valid page name:  (was:  )
Error in sys.excepthook:
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/apport_python_hook.py", line 153, in apport_excepthook
    with os.fdopen(os.open(pr_filename,
FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/var/crash/_usr_bin_zim.1000.crash'

Original exception was:
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/zim/notebook/page.py", line 153, in makeValidPageName
    Path.assertValidPageName(newname)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/zim/notebook/page.py", line 139, in assertValidPageName
    raise AssertionError('Not a valid page name: %s' % name)
AssertionError: Not a valid page name: 

During handling of the above exception, another exception occurred:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/zim/gui/pageview/__init__.py", line 6679, in do_populate_popup
    self._default_do_populate_popup(menu)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/zim/gui/pageview/__init__.py", line 6828, in _default_do_populate_popup
    href = HRef.new_from_wiki_link(link['href'])
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/zim/notebook/page.py", line 375, in new_from_wiki_link
    names = Path.makeValidPageName(href.lstrip('+')) if href else ""
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/zim/notebook/page.py", line 155, in makeValidPageName
    raise ValueError('Not a valid page name: %s (was: %s)' % (newname, name))
ValueError: Not a valid page name:  (was:  )

Comments

I would not have expected that an invalid link results in an error but Zim will correct the code smoothly as also done in other parts of the software.

I would see the algorithm that decides to automatically convert a string into a link item in the task to also check the validity of a link item (assuring a consistent handling of links).

In contrast to the faulty anchor link a http link with the same leading space will not fail: [[ http://test.net/path|http://test.net/path]]

Instead of opening the web browser this faulty link will create the new Zim pages

http
      test.netpath

But it will not raise an error. So there the code is correct, even though I'm not happy with the result.