Zim

Raised as a usability problem by 15 people on Hacker News over 12 years (2015–2026), in 10 threads.

People raised many different problems with Zim, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 15 complaints

Notebook is messy, so finding things depends on the user being skilled enough2026-03-02
Zim app does not work for all of the commenter's use cases2024-10-19
Spellcheck is missing natively and its plug-in is hard to install and get working2022-07-19
Search is poor, so the person could not find notes easily2022-03-02
Pasted code gets garbled or auto-formatted, causing lost snippets2022-01-27
Cannot disable word or line wrapping, which is annoying2022-01-27
Can't type to search within the syntax selection dropdown2022-01-27
Window maximize takes 3 seconds; shortcuts feel strange and UI is unnative2022-01-27
PlantUML insertion is clunky because previews don't update live, requiring submit before seeing results2022-01-26
Pasting code gets garbled or auto-creates unwanted tags2022-01-26
Custom syntax means regular Markdown editors can't be used with its notes2021-09-30
Effectively unusable on the phone, so notes must be staged and transferred later2018-09-07
Whole program refuses to open when one note has unreadable characters, and logs don't say which file2016-12-15
Inserting equations requires a dialog instead of typing directly in markup2015-10-27
Google Drive sync fails when it runs while the note file is being edited2015-01-26