Zim

How to effectively refactor notebook structure?

Asked by mzatanoskas

Hello, have been looking for an effective system to organise my notes and thoughts etc for some time now and my current system is just to keep a bunch of text files in a folder hierarchy as it is, Zim seems to be the perfect program for me. I'm liking it a lot in the few days I've been using it.

The context to my question is that I have started a couple of separate notebooks and then decided that I would like to merge them into one.

As both notebook root folders are contained in the same folder, I simply created a new notebook with its root as the parent folder.

Unfortunately the result was that I now have a huge amount of ghost pages in the index sidepanel that mirror all the real pages that are properly organised in their folders.

As I often reorganise my text files in different folders, and will probably want to do the same in Zim, especially while I'm migrating all my notes there, I was wondering what is the proper/best way to refactor your notebook structure?

(I'm using zim 0.6 on windows 7)

Thanks a lot for a great program!

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Revision history for this message
mzatanoskas (mzatanoskas) said : 		#1

Ok, I should have spent a little longer fiddling around with Zim before I posted.

I think I've figured out the ghost links problem. In my Home page I had a lot of :NewPage style links that I guess are 'absolute' style links to the root folder of the notebook. When I created a new notebook that encompassed the two others, those links then referred to non-existent pages in the new root folder, and so Zim automatically created them for me in the index pane.

I guess I need to be careful to make all links relative if I want to move things around. That seems sensible anyway.

I've also realised how easy it is to drag and drop pages/folders around in the index pane for reorganising, so I guess this is the best way to refactor the folder structure.

I'm still open to comments from old hands on the best way to do things...

Revision history for this message
Jaap Karssenberg (jaap.karssenberg) said : 		#2

In addition if you use the "move page" function from the File menu, it will
ask explicitly if you want to update links from / to that page.

When refactoring smaller pieces of text, select them in the page and use
the "Move selected text" from the context menu.

Regards,

Jaap

P.S. you will get more feedback if you ask these type of questions in the
mailing list - here it is just me answering :)

On Thu, Feb 6, 2014 at 8:16 PM, mzatanoskas <
<email address hidden>> wrote:

> Question #243474 on Zim changed:
> https://answers.launchpad.net/zim/+question/243474
>
> Status: Open => Solved
>
> mzatanoskas confirmed that the question is solved:
> Ok, I should have spent a little longer fiddling around with Zim before
> I posted.
>
> I think I've figured out the ghost links problem. In my Home page I had
> a lot of :NewPage style links that I guess are 'absolute' style links to
> the root folder of the notebook. When I created a new notebook that
> encompassed the two others, those links then referred to non-existent
> pages in the new root folder, and so Zim automatically created them for
> me in the index pane.
>
> I guess I need to be careful to make all links relative if I want to
> move things around. That seems sensible anyway.
>
> I've also realised how easy it is to drag and drop pages/folders around
> in the index pane for reorganising, so I guess this is the best way to
> refactor the folder structure.
>
> I'm still open to comments from old hands on the best way to do
> things...
>
> --
> You received this question notification because you are an answer
> contact for Zim.
>

Revision history for this message
mzatanoskas (mzatanoskas) said : 		#3

Thanks Jaap for a great program and the replies, I'll subscribe to the mailing list now.