Mobile interaction with vimwiki [possibly OT?]

[steen]

Hey all,
I use vimwiki as a general information dump/ notes on everything
application. I've been trying to come up with a reasonable way of
being able to interact with it on my mobile device, so I can access
and add information to it wherever. This turns out to be annoying.

My setup:
I have an android phone. I use dropbox on both it and my laptop, and I
have an alias set from my vimwiki directory to within dropbox's
directory so I have flexibility in where I put the originals. On the
phone the dropbox app allows me to view the files within a text editor
of choice (in my case Ted, but that's kind of arbitrary) and (as of
the most recent update) to search for text within the files. This
works ...okay.

Things I'm missing:
Just having a phone client that allows for following links would be
immensely useful. Being able to edit with that client would be
awesome.

I sometimes make todo lists using vimwiki's * [ ] syntax. it would be
really nice to be able to search for this string to find undone tasks,
also to search for some sort of tag syntax ( which is all personal and
experimental since it doesn't exist natively within vimwik, I tend to
use @syntax but that's in flux). But regex within dropbox seems to be
I guess not really regex or perhaps I am doing it wrong. it would be
_really_ nice if I could get something on the phone that magically
makes those into checkboxes, but, whatever.

I realize this question is _way_ out of scope for this list, but I'm
wondering if anyone else has tried to do this, and if so, did you make
it work better than I have? I'm also kind of curious about solutions
for iOS, I don't have one of those but am considering a tablet of some
sort and a good vimwiki solution could be a compelling argument toward
one platform or the other :)

-- Steen

[Stu]

Steen,

Thanks for sharing your experiences.

I have been successful integrating Vim/Vimwiki on the "desktop", with TrunkNotes http://www.appsonthemove.com/trunk.htm on iOS.  TrunkNotes allows editing in markdown syntax, viewing of rendered pages, searching, tagging, management of tasks, and a whole lot more.  It also supports [[-wikilinks which are used by Vimwiki, but are not included in the original markdown specification by John Gruber.  Highlighting looks decent in Vimwiki when configured with the markdown syntax.

The more advanced features (e.g. ToDo lists in Vimwiki, or tasks in TrunkNotes) are not interoperable, but in principle they can be used on the respective platforms with just a little bit of care.  Others have remarked that folding in Vimwiki does not work for markdown syntax as it does for the default syntax; I haven't tested this.

The trickiest part for me was coming up with a solution for compiling the resulting markdown on my desktop.  As of Vimwiki v1.2, the default compiler did not accept markdown syntax (this may change in v1.3).  Instead, I developed a handcrafted solution using the Discount compiler http://www.pell.portland.or.us/~orc/Code/discount/.  Discount is invoked through the "custom_wiki2html" option provided by Vimwiki v1.3 dev.  This is an advanced feature, and requires knowledge of shell scripting.  For example, a simple line from my script reads:

    perl -p -i -e 's#(?<!`)\[\[([^\]]*)\]\](?!`)#\[${1}\]#g'

That said, I have succeeded in recreating the Html output as it looks on TrunkNotes, and am able to edit and view my wiki on both platforms.  My next challenge is adding a third.

Hope this helps.  Happy hacking!

- S.

[steen]

Thanks Stu for your reply. There's a lot of great information here to work with.

As far as Android goes, I have found Ema Wiki ( http://bit.ly/HzkhDv )
, which while designed to work specifically with a windows desktop
client, understands enough common syntax with VimWiki to be kind of
useable. It's broken in some pretty essential ways (it always uses
it's own index.txt for some reason and ignores mine, so I've had to
put links to my most used pages in that) but it's functional enough
that I've been using it mostly happily.

Just thought I'd toss that out for anyone else trying to solve this problem.

-- Steen

[Stuart Andrews]

At first glance, Ema does not support [[Double-bracketed-links]], and so I am curious to know how you create and use internal wikilinks in Vimwiki.

Do you use CamelCase links, or have you developed a solution for internal links created with Ema's {link} syntax?

Thanks,
- Stu

[steen]

Oh, this is one of the things that is "broken" to which I was
referring earlier, but I forget about it because I just use CamelCase
anyway. Sorry about that.

Really someone needs to make an android client which actually
understands a standardized wiki syntax, but I despair of the notion of
a "standardized wiki syntax" ever existing. But that is a problem
outside the scope of this thread.

-- Steen