Competitors

Zim's biggest competitor is the Mono-based Tomboy, which is part of the standard Ubuntu distribution. Tomboy offers a number of features that Zim does not offer, such as an alarm function, support for WebDAV-based or SSH-based synchronization, and a blog poster add-in that gives users a convenient option for publishing notes as blog entries.

On the other hand, Zim has a number of advantages over the Tomboy note-taking application. For example, Zim uses a plain text format, so notes are easy to read with a third-party program. Also, the texts are named intuitively. Tomboy hides its virtually unintelligible XML notes in a hidden directory with cryptic hash file names. Tomboy also lacks a to-do list, direct integration of graphics, and checkbox support.

Conclusions

Although Zim is a great performer with a number of useful features, it does have a few drawbacks. The program still lacks a feature for exporting wikis directly as a website, nor does it have an alarm feature to remind you of deadlines. As in Tomboy, the menu and buttonbar take up too much space in the program window. And, like other digital notepads, the program lacks a simple option for forwarding a note to a third party, which would be useful because in some cases, groupware might just be overkill.