Wikis are normally all about group collaboration – but it doesn’t have to be that way. WikidPad is a simple text editor which allows you to construct a custom personal wiki on your own PC, perfect for organising thoughts, ideas, to-do lists, contacts and more.

How does it work? Suppose you need to buy a few birthday presents for someone. Just enter BirthdayPresents in the start page, and because that’s a mixed-case “wikiword” it’ll be automatically underlined; double-click it and a new page called “BirthdayPresents” will appear in the navigation pane. You can click this and enter new text there; you might add subpages below that one with, perhaps, possible present ideas; and if you type BirthdayPresents on some other page then it’ll automatically act as a link to your new page.

Repeat this process with a few other keywords and you’ll soon have a tree showing how your topics are organised. If you’ve named and organised the tree sensibly then this will be easy enough to browse, although if you still can’t find something then a powerful search tool (with regular expression support) may be able to help.

Create your own personal wiki to store and link your thoughts and ideas

Of course you also get plenty of text styling options to ensure the pages look as you’d like.

And while this is a personal wiki tool, if you’d like to share your work with others then WikidPad does provide some useful HTML options: in just a click or two you can export and publish the wiki as one, or maybe several HTML files.

Unfortunately, figuring out how to make all this happen isn’t as easy as you might expect. The program does come with a detailed Help file (presented in a wiki itself, of course), but it’s more about explaining individual features in detail than walking beginners through their first steps, and so it might take you a while to figure out what’s going on.

Once you have mastered the basics, though, creating and maintaining a wiki with WikidPad is relatively easy. Just type in a wikiword (such as BirthdayPresents, above) which already has content and it’ll automatically turn blue to indicate a link, no other syntax required. And so you’ll be able to extend your wiki quickly and with the minimum of hassle.