Plain Text vs. Notes/writing apps

I had huge hopes for Notebooks but, as far as I’ve seen, it still lacks a decent web clipper. (Despite how dusty the app is, Evernote still reigns king in that field and I wonder why no developer seems intent on taking that crown from them.)

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I’m not ready to give it an endorsement as my go to for everything, but for some use cases I’m finding Notion to be pretty great.

I’m using it for study material (my job requires a written test every 5 weeks).

Being able to use toggles is great to write notes in question format with the answer behind a toggle.

If I want to go more in depth I can create a new page right within the same document.

Again, it can’t replace an everything bucket (yet) but for some uses it’s very powerful.

I have and is DT as well but even the sync annoys me. It’s something great about Evernote. Sync is so fast.

So thanks for sending me down the ZettelKästen rabbit hole :confused:

LOL

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I am evolving more and more toward a plain-text, app-agnostic approach. Take markdown, for instance. I can edit it with anything from TextEdit to nano in the terminal to LibreOffice to VS Code. Having a preview is secondary and not essential (although preferred).

Currently I am using VS Code for both ZettelKästen files and all my SSG sites using 11ty (markdown, nunjuck templates, javascript, CSS, etc.) I like that the files are both portable to many editing environments and can be powerfully parsed/manipulated by 11ty or other SSG’s. It’s a ‘separation of concern’ between content authoring and content output. All the power has been moved to the generator. By the time the file is delivered to the reader it’s in plain old HTML.

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Like @ryanjamurphy, I keep my notes in standard file formats (typically HTML for me, so that I can use rich-text features like multiple highlight colors and text colors, but also lots of diagrams, spreadsheets, etc., in other standard formats) in my computer’s filesystem and index them in DEVONthink (v2), with heavy use of file tagging. I never edit the content of files in DEVONthink, but use “Open with…” (usually “Open with default editor”, keyboard shortcut: shift-command-O) like @tonycraine and @ryanjamurphy to edit files in my preferred editors.

I also use Leap.app, Finder, BBEdit, and Terminal to browse/search/batch-modify files. This is another benefit of using standard file formats in the filesystem: I can use a variety of file editors and filesystem interfaces. I suspect this gives me more control than the “obscured database” approach that you mentioned as the alternative.

I’ve been happily working this way for about five years and I don’t anticipate changing.

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How do you edit HTML files? That’s been my main hesitation with that format. Are there any semi-WYSIWYG editors that provide a nice experience?

I feel a little embarrassed by how low-tech my response is: I use TextEdit for notes! I think it works great. It’s full, not semi, WYSIWYG. I wrote an AppleScript service that I invoke with a keyboard shortcut (F16) whenever I want to write a note. It prompts for a date and time (autofilled with the current date and time), creates an HTML file at the proper place in the filesystem, opens it in TextEdit, and inserts the provided date and time.

I only use TextEdit for notes and journal entries in my Zettelkasten-like personal hypertext system (and yes I insert hyperlinks between relevant notes in addition to tags). Longer-form one-off writing projects, formal letters, etc., are done in other apps (Scrivener, Word, etc.).

Years ago, the DEVONthink developers quickly implemented a feature request of mine (or bug fix, depending on your point of view) so that I could do things the way I wanted, which was very helpful.

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Huh. I didn’t know TextEdit handled HTML at all. Thanks for the elucidation!

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Tip: Use TextEdit’s Preferences to set the HTML saving options.

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@nat-art You mentioned using the Leap app and I see that it and the related Yep app are part of the latest BundleHunt offering. What are its benefits?

Wild! Haven’t heard of anyone doing this before.

@gxwilso: Leap’s greatest strengths are in tag browsing/management. If you are not a heavy user of tags you may not have any use for it. I will quote what I wrote elsewhere about it:

if all notes are stored in the same location (as say ‘Notes Universal’ within iCloud Drive, Dropbox etc.), the apps used to access them matter less. As long as they can be pointed at that single source for reference, editing, or managing.
DT3 can also join the party without becoming the centre of attention.
Hazel can be used to sort notes into subfolders allowing you throw your gems into one basket knowing they will be sorted into diamonds, sapphires etc.
The same system works well for the downloads folder. FWIW.

Hook is worth a look for unifying research activity.

Thursday,12 March,2020. 08:47 UKL

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I know I’m late to the party. I’ve been using plain text in DropBox for years. First with Byword. Now with Ulysses. Write in Drafts then copy over later.

Including pix or sketches with notes make them more effective. This is clunky vs not possible with plain text. May just go back to Evernote (with all its problems).

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Same here! It is exactly how I feel. I have recently been using plain text for most of my writing. I have been accessing these files using Vim on the Mac and iVim on iOS. It has been working well so far.

I’d like to think that the older you get the more likely you are to go for plain text. It’s not just that plain text was first and old-fashioned, its that you gain experience over the years of being burned when the format you had been using goes away. (I still have some WordStar files from the early 1980’s)

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tomalmy wrote
I’d like to think that the older you get the more likely you are to go for plain text.

So THAT explains it :smiley:

Yeah, I got burned by Apple changing the format of Pages files and the new version couldn’t open the old files. Come on Apple, Pages isn’t that old and your already abandoning files just a few years old?

I have to say I had given up, but Obsidian is remarkable and I am trying again to tend my garden on .md files.

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Above I described how my own personal hypertext note system is simply a set of interlinked HTML files created with TextEdit and tagged with standard macOS tags. I’ve been using this system for years; it’s simple, easy, robust, and works out of the box with any standard install of macOS since 10.9 Mavericks.

Recently I encountered a comment on Hacker News, written just a few months ago by someone who apparently does not use macOS, that illustrates so well why Mac users are fortunate to have tags at the operating-system level. The commenter wrote:

It seems to me that the reason note taking is complex, and so fractured, is because of lack of label support in OS’s. Data is mismanaged at the data level, and we are looking for solutions to that problem with applications rather than at the OS level where it belongs.

The file tree idea, where a file exists in only one place in the hierarchy is wrong. I’d rather all my notes/files were in one big bucket, but that I could label each, and then sort by labels.

I may want to label a file as ‘software’, ‘tech-architecture’ and ‘finance’ – all of them. When I look up any one of those labels, I want to get all the related content. I shouldn’t need to guess which bucket I put a note into. So, I say labels should be data associated to files like modified date, or author.

To fix the problem of ‘no label’ as part of the data, I try to use a note taking that applies labels for me. But then an app developer is going to want to do all sorts of extra stuff.

I understand that having tons of label data on the file could become ridiculous though. Perhaps the real answer would be to have a hidden metadata file associated with the data itself (eg ‘mytext.txt.meta’) – labels and any other metadata would go in here, separate to the note ‘mytext.txt’ itself.

So, I think OS’s enforce a data organisational structure on us that is unnatural to the way we think and work. And we seek to fix it with apps. And we will never get satisfaction that way :frowning:

I pity this poor soul who has not discovered macOS and can only dream of “label support at the OS level”. But this comment from someone who is living in some alternate personal-computing universe without tags shows how those of us using macOS tags are living in a world where a big problem has already been solved. It’s a problem that we don’t need to “seek to fix with apps”.

The yearning has been satisfied; the battle has been won; the dream of tags at the OS level has been realized. We don’t need a proprietary app (or a sequence of them, one after another) to achieve a tagged and interlinked personal hypertext note system.

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