Favored "bucket" app - DEVONthink v. Keep-It vs. EagleFiler etc

Posted by MadaboutDana
Jun 19, 2019 at 10:20 AM

Having criticised EagleFiler, I’ve recently rediscovered its benefits.

I’m trying, as mentioned before, to compress down the number of apps I use to manage my vast store of general information, which comprises web pages saved out as PDF files.

At the same time, I’m trying to move away from all-in-one and proprietary databases towards tools that manage individual files (so no user tie-in).

Hence my excitement at rediscovering FoxTrot Pro.

I’ve used Curiota, which is good, but imposes its own structure on folders/files. I’ve been trying to use Notebooks, which would be excellent, except for its PDF-handling limitations (mentioned already elsewhere).

So I dug out my EagleFiler licence again and downloaded the latest version. And discovered that it’s more flexible than I remember. Also, it has one unique feature: a setting that allows you to specify that it should save web pages out as a single long PDF page (so not automatically convert them into A4-sized printable pages, which is what everybody else does).

It took me a little experimenting to find out how to do this (it’s actually ridiculously easy using the one-press import key, which is F1 by default). If you use the context menu’s “Save PDF to EagleFiler” option, you get A4 pages again - which is sometimes useful, but not my preferred approach).

The other thing I hadn’t fully taken on board is that you can set up an EagleFiler library more or less anywhere. It’s basically the same thing as a FoxTrot index. You have to manually initiate a rescan to get it to index files added through Finder or other file management tools, but that’s scarcely a hardship.

So it’s back on my list of Very Useful Info Management Tools.

Cheers,
Bill