Basket

  • July 20, 2013
  • 2 minutes

I recently had a closer look at Microsoft OneNote 2010. Already took a look at it some time (years) ago, didn’t convince me. 2010 release seems to be much more the way I expect it to be. Storage of data is still proprietary format of course, but at least it’s one file per page, one directory per (sub)notebook. Also the overhead for storing a few kB of text seems to be much less than 2007 version (from memory).Deleted content doesn’t immediately lead to file size reduction, but there seems to be a compaction/garbage collection feature that seems to do the job.

With this in mind, I had a look at KDE’s answer to OneNote : basKet.

Also had a look at it some years ago, but finally went for Zim, as it was text-file based an provided the minimal set of syntax features needed, plus task management. Unfortunately, zim has no real support for tables, and its media managemment is prettty basic (attached files, no preview etc), so maybe it’s the right time to rethink over basKet !

Pages are called baskets, baskets can contain sub-baskets. Baskets can have a multi-column layout or allow free placement of widgets. Background color/image are also possible (per basket). Baskets are stored as directories within /home/jhf/.kde4/share/apps/basket/baskets, however the mapping of subbaskets inside baskets is done in the baskets.xml file, not by using directory structures. Baskets are named basketXYZ (XYZ is an incremental counter), and items inside the basket noteXYZ.html. Mapping and relative placement of items within basket is done using the .basket file (XML format). From this file it looks like there is a plan for mindmap format, but it’s not yet implemented (v1.81 in kde 4.10.5)

So far so good. Surfing the internet to read some user experience & feedback, I however found out that basKet is no longer developped (main developper complains about lack of time). The roadmap of the project looks promising but the last commits in the git repo are from 10 months ago, last full release is v1.81 (which is actually v2.0beta2) from 2010 :-(

So the question is : is it worth moving from zim to basket ? Are there other alternatives that are still maintained ?

Searching for alternatives :

Two tools that look promising so far :