Personal Wiki recommendations?

Question

I want to set up a personal Wiki on my Windows machine to keep track of all sorts of information that's spread out across text files / notes etc. So my requirements for a Wiki are:

• Runs on Windows XP and Vista
• Doesn't require database
• Has built-in web server
• Keeps unlimited page change history
• Allows to attach files
• Full-text search through Wiki pages and most attachments (PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Text, HTML, XML)
• WYSIWYG page editor
• Export to HTML / PDF
• Uses as little resources as possible

Since it'll be a single-user Wiki, I don't care about features such as RSS feeds, user groups and such. I looked at http://www.wikimatrix.org/ but couldn't really find a suitable project. This one here, for instance, is too small - no file attachments, no WYSIWYG editior: http://wiki-in-a-jar.sourceforge.net/

Can you recommend something that suits my needs?

Answer 1

You could try TiddlyWiki. Just a html file with javascript engine. No database, no webserver.

Answer 2

Consider using the Microsoft One Note. Its really not a wiki application but can serve most of the things you are asking for.

Answer 3

If you want something with a webserver - MoinMoin has a desktop edition.

Python based, saved as files, easy to run.

Answer 4

Debated before, e.g general-development-notes, or personal-code-library.

Answer 5

I use ScrewTurn Wiki quite a lot which has a Desktop version. It is C# Open Source.

http://www.screwturn.eu

The 3.0 version has a WYSIWYG Editor but is still in Alpha. Try it out though.

For Wiki comparisons check out the Wiki Matrix: http://www.wikimatrix.org

Answer 6

roll your own

      - hacker

Answer 7

You could install MediaWiki on XAMPP. I've done this and it:

• lives on a USB thumb drive;
• runs on any recent windows system without any further installation;
• is easily shared by many users once started as a standard webapp;
• has all the regular features of MediaWiki, covering most (all?) of your requirements.

Answer 8

I use ikiwiki which satisfies most of your requirements. At its core, ikiwiki is a "wiki compiler" that takes source text as Markdown (or other markup language, configured by plugin) and renders it to static HTML. You can set up ikiwiki to store changes in a real source control system (I store my wiki in Git).

ikiwiki is written in Perl so it's reasonably portable, but I haven't tried to run it on Windows. It doesn't have its own built in web server, but most of the time you don't even need one (just point your browser to the HTML files it generates). The great thing for me is I can edit my wiki on my laptop while offline and merge the changes later (I store the master copy on a hosted server).

Answer 9

I decided to go with JSPWiki. It fulfills most of my requirements, except for

• not having a built-in web server: I can use Jetty,
• not doing full-text search on attachments: for the time being, I can have Google Desktop finding them, and
• no built-in export to PDF/HTML: I could crawl the Wiki for HTML.

It does rely on a database, but it's an embedded one, so that's fine for me - I was worried about multiple installations of MySQL or Postgres.

I seriously looked at two other Wikis:

• MoinMoin: Comes close, but runs on Python (as a Java guy, I already have Java installed, but not Python) and doesn't treat attachments as well as JSPWiki (attaching the same file multiple times doesn't create trackable versions).
• XWiki: Runs on Java, but was too heavyweight for what I wanted to do.

As always, YMMV, but this is what worked for me.

Answer 10

You should look at ConnectedText (www.connectedtext.com). It has all standard wiki features, it is robust and included semantic extensions, not available in other systems.