Configure environment variables

Environment variables contain basic information about the system and are used to configure zim.

Environment variables

• LANGUAGE: defines the language used by language code, see below
• HOME: defines the home folder, all other paths starting with ~/ refer to this folder
• USER: define the user name

See also the "XDG" parameters defined the freedesktop.org basedir specification for more fine grained control.

On windows we use default locations for the XDG paths relative to the APPDATA folder.

Note that on linux paths are seperated by ":" while on windows they are separated by ";".

Language codes

The language code is a two-letter abbreviation optionally followed by a region code. For example 'en' for English, 'en_US' for US English and 'en_GB' for British English. For most languages, only the two letter abbreviation is enough.

To find the abbreviation for your language refer to this list: List_of_ISO_639-1_codes (WP). Or check the "locale" folder in zim to find out the installed translations.

Setting environment variables

Windows system configuration

To set it system wide, edit the environment variables in: control panel / system / advanced system settings / advanced / environmental variables

Portable windows verions

To set it just for the portable install of zim, edit the config file ZimDesktopWikiPortable\App\AppInfo\Launcher\ZimDesktopWikiPortable.ini. The section [Environment] specifies environment parameters to be set before executing

Script

Windows .bat script

Example zim.bat script to execute zim with environment set:

set PATH=%PATH%;"C:\localdata\Graphviz 2.21\bin"
set LANG=nl
zim.exe

Unix shell script

Example zim.sh script to execute zim with environment set:

export PATH=$PATH:~/bin/
export LANG=nl
zim