i’m a lumberjaph

There is differents reasons to want a personal wiki on your machine:

• privacy
• having it everywhere

I’ve tested some wiki, like tiddlywiki, but I’ve found nothing that was
really what i wanted. The main inconveniance for me, is the need to use a
webbrowser. A browser is not a text processor, so it’s really painfull to
use them for writing.

I’ve started to try to use vim as wiki. Why would i want to use something
like vim for this ? well, it’s plain text (easy to grep, or to write
script for manipulating data), application independent, it’s a real text
processor, you can customize it, and most importantly, i know how to use
it, …

I’ve got a ‘wiki’ directory in my home directory, with all my files in it.
I use git to versionize it (you can use svn if you prefer, there is no
difference for this usage). In my .vimrc, i’ve added this instruction:

set exrc

In my wiki directory, i’ve got another .vimrc with some specific mapping:

    map ,I  <esc>:e index.mkd <cr>
    map ,T  <esc>:e todo.mkd <cr>
    map ,S  <esc>:e someday.mkd <cr>
    map ,c  <esc>:s/^ /c/<cr>
    map ,w  <esc>:s/^ /w/<cr>
    map ,x  <esc>:s/^ /x/<cr>
    map gf :e <cfile>.mkd<cr> " open page
    map <backspace> :bp<cr>
    imap \date <c-R>=strftime("%Y-%m-%d")<cr>
    set tabstop=2                   " Number of spaces <tab> counts for.
    set shiftwidth=2                " Unify
    set softtabstop=2               " Unify

I organize my files in directory. I’ve got a “work”, “lists”, “recipes”,
“misc”, … and I put my files in this directory.

I’ve got an index page, with links to main section. I don’t have wikiword
in camelcase or things like that, so if i want to put a link to a page, i
juste wrote the link this way ‘dir_name/page_name’, then, i juste have to
hit ‘gf’ on this link to open the page.

I also use this place as a todo list manager. I’ve got one paragrah per
day, like this :

    2008-06-14
      - [@context] task 1
      - [@context] task 2
      ...

and a bunch of vim mapping for marking complete (,c), work in progress
(,w) or cancelled (,x).

If i don’t have a deadline for a particular task, I use a ’someday’ file,
where the task is put with a context.

The good things with markdown, is that the syntax is easy to use, and
it’s easy to convert to HTML.