Alexander, I will try to take a look at Textpad again. I hadn't thought about it for several years. Thanks for the suggestion.

I also have done some extensive experiments with Ultra Edit as a plain-text note-taker. In general it worked very well: I was especially impressed by the quick and clever tiling of multiple files. The main weaknesses, it seemed to me, were the overpoweringly nerdy quality of the program (though you can simplify the tool bars if you wish) and the visually confusing quality of the search results box. The latter in particular stumped me: I wanted to get rid of the full paths in the search results box, but I was never able to figure out how to do that.

I suppose the other major problem with Ultra Edit is that you're likely to end up with a zillion small files. Of course you can organize them nicely in a tree with the projects feature, but it still means you have a lot of small files floating around on your hard disk. That makes me a bit uneasy.

Bill

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Alexander Deliyannis wrote:

Bill, you might want to try an intermediate solution like Textpad, one of the
many text editors I am currently playing around with. Its advantage is a separate pane
showing all open files; you can actually save the set as a workspace which I think is
very convenient. Then for a large project, such as a book, each chapter could be a
separate file.

I am impressed by the potential of plain text files, and this coming
from someone who has used plain text in most of his writing. What I had never considered
was the transparent freedom in combining programs that comes from working with this
format. For example, I started today working on a text in Textroom, one of the
minimalist full screen editors we've discussed here in the past. I then opened it in
Textpad along with other related material. I included outline information via
leading spaces. This in turn can be directly copied or opened by the EmEditor outline
plug-in and even Brainstorm, which will recognise the levels and create the
corresponding hierarchy.

In short, I can switch anytime to a more convenient
environment for the task at hand, all the time without having to export/import and
lose info along the way. (Brainstorm default files are not plain text, but it can write
to plain text very easily).

Wow!