====== Strategies ======

This page tries to gather some usage strategies for zim. Not every style of working works for everybody so these are just suggestions, not enforced use cases or something like that.

===== Maintaining overview =====
One of the main problems with large data sets is maintaining overview. 

=== Searching ===
The brute-force method to solve this is a powerful search function. The problem with searching, however, is that although potentially you can find everything, in reality you will only find the things you are looking for. This sounds like a good thing, but when you think about it it doesn't create overview. A search function is like a flashlight in a forest at night - you only see the things you point it at, but you'll never see the thing just outside the light circle.

=== Structuring ===
So we need to look for a more structured way of keeping overview. The best way to do this is by dividing your data into eatable chunks. This means having a hierarchical structure with ages instead of one long list. If the page list get so long you can't visually scan it at once you need to structure it in smaller categories; in practice it works best when you have between 5 and 25 items per category, but your mileage may vary.

The same goes for pages. Especially when brainstorming one tends to get long pages with unrelated or half-related thoughts, this needs to be avoided. Try to keep pages strongly topicalized and try to keep them shorter then about 3 times the length that fits on the screen. One can not visually scan text while scrolling so the first few paragraphs should clearly state the topic of the page.

=== Tags ===
FIXME

=== Archiving ===
FIXME

Refactoring - refactoring is the key to come from a collection of random thoughts to a structured text

Multiple ways of using namespaces .. categories .. collection managers .. topics

outlining - dub zim as a multi-page outliner
