Year end Outliner/PIM review/roll call

Posted by Gorski
Jan 3, 2016 at 12:52 AM

I’m a Windows user.

My history, early 90s to present: Agenda > Zoot > UltraRecall > OneNote/ConnectedText > Emacs orgmode. The transition between them wasn’t nearly as clean as that timeline suggests. Agenda and Zoot were entirely because of the influence of James Fallows. Emacs may follow me to the grave now that I’ve gotten over the learning hump. Zoe will be to blame for that.

For personal use, I now use OneNote mainly to store passwords in an encrypted section and to capture links and short snippets of text while reading on my iPhone or Android tablet. I continue to use OneNote regularly at work (I’ve been in a government job for two years after a lifetime in journalism) because it’s all that’s available to me other than Word. I can’t even run programs off a USB stick for security reasons.

I bounce around between different text editors at home for occasional writing/programming just because I can: Sublime Text, UltraEdit, emEditor, Notetab, Notepad. Notepad only at work. One reason I like ConnectedText and now Emacs is that I can do some basic tagging, etc., in plain text at work then import my notes with some semblance of organization at home.

Recently started using Visual Studio Code for JavaScript programming. Also use RStudio for R programming.

Excel for basic number crunching.

Autohotkey with some personally written code to grab article text from the web and store it in dated files with the URLs. Also for some basic text substitution/expansion.

Foxit Reader for PDFs.

Chrome browser with Save to Pocket extension. No other extensions as I’ve given up on them in general.

xPlorer2 for moving files around, peeking in them.

Nebulous on the iPhone, Jota on the tablet for plain text files.

OneDrive to store most of my files because I’ve got 1 gigabyte for free, Dropbox for just plain text notes mainly because it’s better integrated with the text editors I use on the phone and tablet.

Scanbot on the iPhone to scan to PDF, CamScanner on the tablet.

In addition to those mentioned above I’ve really liked Workflowy, Scrivener, Writemonkey and Brainstorm in the past but don’t use them now.