As mentioned before, there’s one Windows program that I haven’t been able to find a Linux-based replacement for: dogMelon’s Note Studio. This morning I decided to break out a couple of the things I use it for, to see if I could find good replacements for those pieces only.

There are three features that I love about it: it’s set up as a wiki (meaning that I can have links in my pages to other pages); I can encrypt certain pages or entire books; and everything I enter on it is accessible from my Palm TX when I sync it to my Windows machine. But those three features aren’t all necessary for all of the things that I use it for.

One of those uses is keeping linked notes of interesting quotes and useful miscellaneous information — essentially using it as a traditional wiki. For that, I didn’t need encryption, and having the information on my Palm handheld was optional, but I definitely needed the page-linking capabilities. And it had to be something portable, because I had to be able to use it from both Linux and Windows.

Plain-text files and word-processor files were completely out, no page-linking there. I considered using standard HTML files, but I didn’t really want to spend the time needed to muck around with creating HTML code. I didn’t really want to set up an HTTP server either, but the only other things I could think of were a browser-based package like WordPress or Greymatter, or something in Java or PHP, and those would require an HTTP server. So I gritted my teeth and started looking into those.

I found references to something called TiddlyWiki, and decided to check it out. Portable and OS independent, check. Open source, nice if I decide that something needs changing. Extendable via plug-ins, quite nice. I played around with it for a bit, learning the basics of editing it and the markups, and it didn’t look too difficult. I decided to see what it required in the way of server-side software.

Hm, no requirements page. Ah, there’s a “getting started” topic… with a link to a “download software” topic… hm, it’s only a single HTML file, that makes things fairly simple. But still nothing about the requirements. Yes, when I run it locally it works, and I can save my changes, but where does it save them to?

It saves them to the HTML file?!

Once I managed to crank my jaw back into place, I looked into it further, and was amazed. Here was a quite decent little system that was set up entirely as a single self-contained HTML file. Code, data, stylesheet, everything. Written in javascript, so it should work on practically any browser, under practically any OS. Un-frickin’-believable! And there are at least three variations designed explicitly for the GTD system too, so it could replace the Thinking Rock program that I’ve been trying to use as well!

We had our winner. 🙂

The other vital thing that I used Note Studio for was keeping a list of passwords. For this, the wiki capabilities of it were fairly irrelevant, but both the encryption capabilities and (to a lesser extent) the ability to share information with the Palm TX were vital. TiddlyWiki wasn’t going to cut it here.

However, there’s a perfectly good program that would: KeePass, available for Windows and Linux/MacOSX (as KeePassX, and in the Ubuntu repositories under that name). There’s even a basic PalmOS converter, so that you can at least read your KeePass data on the Palm, though it seems to be solely for Windows at present.

With these two programs, I shouldn’t have to rely on Note Studio (and VMware) anymore. Well, except for Windows programming. 🙂