Zim

Is there a technical reason not to have all your notes in one notebook?

Asked by mzatanoskas

Sorry for posting two questions in a row, I figured it's better to have one question per post, but I'm not sure what the policy is here.

I read somewhere, site/manual(?) that if the notes are not interconnected then it is better not to have all your notes in one notebook.

I was wondering why this was? Is there a technical reason that means performance degrades significantly beyond a certain folder depth or number of files?

As it is, I want to use Zim for a number of projects, study notes, plans, thoughts, everything I can write down basically. I often find that while I'm studying something, a thought pops up about something completely different that I want to write down before it goes out of my head again. I don't want to have to open up a new notebook to do that, but would much rather just use the index sidepanel to quickly go to the right place or even just create a new page there and then and move it later.

Anyway I just wondered about this, whether there are any technical or theoretical reasons. If there are big drawbacks to my approach then I don't want to try and force the program to do what it isn't designed to do.

Thanks you!

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Jaap Karssenberg
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Best Jaap Karssenberg (jaap.karssenberg) said : 		#1

No there is no strict technical reason. In fact most users favor a single
notebook for "stuff going on" (have a look at the GTD usage). Having
multiple notebooks makes sense for example for compiling reference data for
different projects.

However some I would advise to use at least some sub-structure in the
notebook. In my design I do kind of assume that there is a topic relation
between sub-pages and the parent page.

You could start dumping everything in an "inbox" page and at a quite moment
clean out this page again and put ideas / tasks / .. in the place where you
can find them back.

On Thu, Feb 6, 2014 at 5:41 PM, mzatanoskas <
<email address hidden>> wrote:

> New question #243477 on Zim:
> https://answers.launchpad.net/zim/+question/243477
>
> Sorry for posting two questions in a row, I figured it's better to have
> one question per post, but I'm not sure what the policy is here.
>
> I read somewhere, site/manual(?) that if the notes are not interconnected
> then it is better not to have all your notes in one notebook.
>
> I was wondering why this was? Is there a technical reason that means
> performance degrades significantly beyond a certain folder depth or number
> of files?
>
> As it is, I want to use Zim for a number of projects, study notes, plans,
> thoughts, everything I can write down basically. I often find that while
> I'm studying something, a thought pops up about something completely
> different that I want to write down before it goes out of my head again. I
> don't want to have to open up a new notebook to do that, but would much
> rather just use the index sidepanel to quickly go to the right place or
> even just create a new page there and then and move it later.
>
> Anyway I just wondered about this, whether there are any technical or
> theoretical reasons. If there are big drawbacks to my approach then I don't
> want to try and force the program to do what it isn't designed to do.
>
> Thanks you!
>
> --
> You received this question notification because you are an answer
> contact for Zim.
>

Revision history for this message
mzatanoskas (mzatanoskas) said : 		#2

Thanks Jaap Karssenberg, that solved my question.

Revision history for this message
Sebastian Audet (smaudet) said : 		#3

I can say from personal experience that there is a bit of a slow down after a while, once your notes become so large. This may not show up for everyone, and may be related to other factors, but I would still split up your notes by meta domain - I have a large number of notes with e.g. my work domain, with a fair amount of nesting and linking, but I keep another for brainstorming, and another for non-work (and another for testing zim).

Revision history for this message
Jaap Karssenberg (jaap.karssenberg) said : 		#4

@sebastian: could you take that discussion to a bug report and specifiy
what exactly slows down so we can fix that? Design should allow scaling the
number of notes quite efficiently.

On Sun, Feb 9, 2014 at 4:26 PM, Sebastian Audet <
<email address hidden>> wrote:

> Question #243477 on Zim changed:
> https://answers.launchpad.net/zim/+question/243477
>
> Sebastian Audet posted a new comment:
> I can say from personal experience that there is a bit of a slow down
> after a while, once your notes become so large. This may not show up for
> everyone, and may be related to other factors, but I would still split
> up your notes by meta domain - I have a large number of notes with e.g.
> my work domain, with a fair amount of nesting and linking, but I keep
> another for brainstorming, and another for non-work (and another for
> testing zim).
>
> --
> You received this question notification because you are an answer
> contact for Zim.
>