I'm using arch and debian systems primarily, with a centos remote server. My work and home workstations use arch, but I don't have root access on the work system, and my laptop is debian.

I have been trying to find a reliable wiki engine software that I can use to edit pages view flat text files via vim or whatever editor, and then be able to sync these across locally held copies on the aforementioned platforms. Ideally I'm looking for a more standalone solution which would have a copy on every system, synced via git, which doesn't require a specific editor or web browser to use. Something like, $engine monitors files in $dir or with a specific extension, these files are plain text and can be edited in any editor, linked, etc, then when modify time changes $engine updates links/references, formatting, and all that other behind-the-scenes stuff.

Vimwiki kinda does this, but it's less portable than I would like as it requires one to use vim to manage the wiki. I personally use vim as my primary editor when possible, but this isn't always possible. Does anyone have any suggestions for another alternative?

Thanks

Kind of mutually exclusive?

Stick Dokuwiki in Virtualbox and start it headless
create an A Record or /etc/hosts for
192.168.1.x mywiki

and surf on in.

Wikis by definition are centralized.

Absolutely, but I'm looking to have more of a distributed type of thing rather than fully centralized just in case I'm not able to access the central location.

Regarding the VM, I'm looking to have this all accessible on multiple platforms, one of which is a VPS, and besides that the idea is to have a wiki option with as little overhead as possible which goes out the window when a system needs a VM running to use the wiki.

"zim" will create a lot of flat files inside its data directory. Those could probably be synchronized via git or something.

zim is what I used for the first 6 years.

It sounds like you could use foswiki as the wiki, with eg inotify+rsync to update multiple copies across systems.