Man in Search of a Method

Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Apr 10, 2009 at 05:17 AM

bobmclain wrote:
>For each non-trivial project, I create a new AceText collection and
>fill it over time with my notes, snippets, and other research. Then, in EditPad Pro, I
>open my AceText collection in the left pane and quickly build my first draft by
>dragging clips from there into my document, then fold the text
>chapter-by-chapter.

That is exactly the way I work in Brainstorm. In fact’ it’s got a ‘magic paste’ feature to monitor whatever you copy to the clipboard, which means that you can concentrate on collecting, confident that all your clips will be there when you start writing. It can handle infinite hierarchies which means that you can organise your collection and then your writings in as simple or as complex a structure as you like. And, it has automatic identification of ‘namesakes’ (‘clones’) i.e. identical entries, which I find extremely useful.

There are surely others, probably remnants of a plain-text era such as Maxthink. One program that has been mentioned here in the not-so-recent past is InSight: http://www.dataomega.com/insight/index.htm I now see that the program has some formatting features; I do not think that these divert from the core plain-ext functionality, but your opinion may vary. It’s been a while since I tried it out.

Here’s an older interesting discussion on the subject of plain text; I’m sure there have been others:
http://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/127

Sideline: I am becoming increasingly interested in the markup languages that one can use from within plain text, such as LaTex. A powerful tool I am investigating is AsciiDoc: http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/