epheterson/Zimi v1.5.0

Zimi v1.5.0 — The Offline Internet, Alive

on GitHub

Zimi now feels alive. Open the app and you're greeted with fresh content — a NASA photo, a Wikipedia anniversary, a random Gutenberg book, tonight's moon phase. Click a link in one source and land in another. Save what matters, find it again later.

This is the biggest update since launch. Over 1,300 new lines across server and client — every feature designed to make offline knowledge feel like the real thing.

Discover

A daily carousel on the home page, built entirely from your installed ZIM library. Every card is a door into your offline knowledge.

• Picture of the Day — NASA APOD's astronomy image
• On This Day — Wikipedia historical events for today's date
• Word of the Day — from Wiktionary, with part of speech and definition
• Quote of the Day — from Wikiquote, beautifully typeset with attribution
• Country of the Day — from CIA World Factbook, with locator map
• Destination, Book, Talk, Comic of the Day — from Wikivoyage, Gutenberg, TED, xkcd
• Moon phase — current lunar phase with illumination and day count
• Loading skeletons while cards fetch. Dismiss with × and bring back anytime. Content is seeded by date — same day, same picks.

Cross-Source Links

Reading a Wikipedia article that links to Wiktionary? Or an entry that references Wikibooks? If you have both installed, the link lights up with a dotted amber underline — click it and you stay in Zimi. Works across the entire wikiverse and beyond — Stack Overflow to GitHub, Wikivoyage to Wikipedia, any source to any source.

• Links to other installed sources are automatically highlighted
• Click to navigate seamlessly across ZIM files
• Batch resolution handles articles with hundreds of links (chunked, parallel)
• Unresolved links look normal — no distracting dimming

Bookmarks & History

• Bookmarks: Click the bookmark icon or press B while reading to save an article. View all bookmarks from the Library panel.
• Search History: Tap the search bar to see recent searches and articles. Type to filter.
• Library Panel: Press H to open — tabs for History and Bookmarks, with search and clear.

Search — 10x Faster with Thumbnails

Search got a complete overhaul under the hood.

• Thumbnails in search results — article images appear alongside titles and snippets
• Smarter snippets — prefers meta descriptions over boilerplate nav text
• Parallel full-text search — each ZIM gets its own thread, results merge as they arrive
• Deferred snippet extraction — cross-ZIM search dropped from ~60s to ~1.5s on large libraries

Other Improvements

• Manual ZIM import via URL — paste a direct link to any .zim file
• Catalog language picker with dark theme styling
• Catalog flavor dropdown (replaces multiple download buttons per variant)
• Better size formatting (900+ MB displays as GB)
• Discover Essentials pack — one-click download of all featured ZIM sources from the Catalog
• Daily content persistence via seeded RNG
• Scroll position preserved when navigating back to Discover
• Mobile layout polish — search bar no longer hides navigation on load
• Rate limiting on batch API endpoints
• Socket timeout protection against slow-client connections

API

New endpoint for cross-source link resolution:

# Resolve a single URL
curl "http://localhost:8899/resolve?url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water"

# Batch resolve
curl -X POST http://localhost:8899/resolve \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"urls": ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water", "https://stackoverflow.com/questions/123"]}'

Install

macOS (Homebrew):

brew tap epheterson/zimi && brew install --cask zimi

macOS (direct download):
Download the DMG for your Mac from the assets below.

Linux (Snap Store):

sudo snap install zimi

Docker:

docker run -v ./zims:/zims -p 8899:8899 epheterson/zimi

Python (any platform):

pip install zimi
zimi serve --port 8899