This looks very promising! Thanks for passing this along.
I have been using iA Writer all day and I’m liking it. It it working perfectly with my new approach of putting everything in iCloud rather than in DEVONThink. It took a while for me to figure iA Writer out but I’m getting it. The ability to create tables and add links with Markdown makes it fast and extremely flexible. My other work documents are in Google Drive so I simply copy the share link to my iA Writer document, same goes for Apple Note and Pages links.
Have you tried Org Mode in Emacs ? I have been playing with this for outlining. It is quite powerful, but does have a rather steep learning curve. It does plain text outlining beautifully and with Pandoc, export is easy.
Use a folder to bundle both docs or use the same name with their different extensions. You could also create a naming convention (i.e., doc1 a.rtf doc1 b.pdf) with the presence of an “a” indicating that there is an other version present.
Huh, never thought about using github for this. I use github all the time for source code, but not my plain text notes. One thing to note is that iA Writer supports different versions of your files.
Thanks, I already use Working Copy, github and Pythonista together on my iPad to write Python code. Never thought to use the same workflow for markdown text files. I’m still not convinced I need that kind of control with my personal notes files, but I’m glad that option exists for when the need might arise. I can see the benefits of this for a team editing the same file. Or perhaps if I was writing a much longer text document where I’d want to have control over the various drafts and published versions, but that’s not something I do very often.
Most of my notes are relatively short, a few paragraphs of information each. Do you put these type of notes in github? What advantage do you see for using github for this?
As I noted recently in the discussion on plain text vs. notes/writing apps, I settled on HTML in TextEdit as my preferred note format for my journal and personal hypertext system (which I also browse in DEVONthink), instead of RTF. It is functionally identically to RTF, providing rich-text features like multiple highlight colors and text colors etc. (but no inline images in TextEdit—I just link to images as sidecar files).
I consider HTML to be far superior to RTF when I want do batch search-and-replace across multiple files using regular expressions (which I typically do with BBEdit’s multi-file search, when necessary). Parsing HTML is super-easy (especially if you’ve been working with HTML most of your life, as I have) but parsing RTF is a horrific nightmare (in my opinion).
I wrote an AppleScript service that I invoke with a keyboard shortcut that creates a new HTML note and opens it for editing in TextEdit. I wrote an AppleScript droplet that I drop files onto when I want to create hyperlinks in my notes.
I’ve been happily working this way for about five years and I don’t anticipate changing. I use plain text for some purposes, but usually I want all the features that rich text provides (but with the underlying clarity of HTML, not the forbidding mess of RTF—just my opinion of course).
Why did you choose HTML over Markdown? The thing I like about markdown is that it is relatively unobtrusive as a markup language. HTML has the opening and closing tags and is just uglier to look at than markdown. It definitely has more capability than markdown, but most of the time it is not needed, at least for my personal notes.
For me the choice wasn’t between HTML and Markdown; it was between WYSIWYGrich text, with features such as multiple highlight colors and text colors, and less fully-featured plain text with visible markup (e.g. Markdown).
I don’t write in HTML or think about HTML at all. The rich text is merely saved as HTML behind the curtain of WYSIWYG goodness. The only time I have to think about the markup is when I am doing batch search-and-replace across multiple files using regular expressions, which is rare.
I am not sure that I can articulate all the reasons why I wanted to take advantage of rich text—which has been built into macOS from the beginning and is almost certainly not going away. I make use of highlighting, just to mention one feature. (Highlighting is a key part of Tiago Forte’s progressive summarization method, which I don’t follow exactly, but my use of highlighting and other formatting is somewhat similar to that.)
If macOS strangely drops support for rich text, I can easily use Pandoc to convert my HTML files to some other format.
I don’t use iOS, which I would guess makes my requirements very different from those of you guys. I don’t have a tablet (except for the Wacom graphics tablet that I connect when needed to whichever of my Macs I am using) and my phone is a tiny rugged eleven-year-old flip phone that someone someday will have to pry from my cold dead hands.
Hi @95omega, I use Devonthink, which works both on MacOS and iOS (albeit with some limitation, the worst one, IMO, is the lack of support of the “open in place” feature).
Bear in mind that Devonthink it is not a “always on” sync (a la dropbox), but it is performed only when (and if) the app is open.
I use it for work notes and sensitive personal documents, since I don’t have an always on Mac or a server. My personal non-sensitive notes live in an iCloud folder.
If I had an always on Mac I’d probably use another service to sync encrypted content, like Nextcloud or Resilio.
