Despite my enthusiastic comments about MyInfo on the "MyInfo 6 Just Released" thread, I confess that I fantasize about finding a plain-text solution for note-taking. I've tried and used a lot of programs through the years, including Treepad, Onenote, Evernote, and MyInfo, and what I feel about all of them is that they're fun to use but are sometimes buggy, often bloated, and invariably force me to lock up my data in a proprietary format. I do hanker after a more lightweight program that uses plain text.

The one alternative I've experimented with most is NoteTab (the Standard variety), which, with its outline feature, is actually quite good for storing notes. Of course if I were to use it, I would lose some text formatting (though it's easy to indicate italics and bold with standard markdown symbols) and images (though I can envision ways of switching easily to another program such as Picasa to look at images).

I'm just wondering whether anyone on this forum has had any extended experience with using NoteTab for note-taking (i.e., not for writing code or creating HTML pages). I would like to hear advice about limitations, pitfalls, etc.

I admit that my own experience with Notetab's outlining features did not impress me particularly. However, I can very much agree with you on the attractiveness of a plain text outlining environment. In this respect, my own favourite is still Brainstorm.

You may be interested in trying out is Insight http://www.dataomega.com/insight/index.htm Though it is basically plain text, it can handle specific styling. What's more, it can read Notetab .otl outline files.

Thanks. I'll take a look at Insight, though the screenshots on their website are not reassuring: it has an incredibly cluttered UI. I'm drawn to minimalism at the moment, but of course I also want enough power and flexibility to organize information in various ways.

Some note-taking programs (Evernote springs to mind as a prime example) seem to be in danger of sinking under the weight of their own complexity. I don't mean that Evernote is especially difficult to use, but you sense that some sort of heavy, clanking, steam-driven machinery -- that's how I envision it, at least -- is thumping away in the background and is threatening to collapse at any moment.

You should also look at ResophNotes:

http://resoph.com/ResophNotes/Welcome.html

It has a plain text mode and syncs with SimpleNote, if that matters to you. It also will display marked up text.

I'm a fan of NoteTab, using it frequently to write first drafts. I tried using it for making day notes, making use of the outline function. I created a new outline document for each month, then made an outline entry for each day. I think this could work pretty well, but in true CRIMP fashion I didn't sustain it.

Steve

Check out emEditor too.

It has an outliner plug-in that lets you move sections of text up and down easily.

http://www.emeditor.com/

http://www.emeditor.com/modules/feature1/rewrite/tc_30.html

Thanks for these various useful suggestions. Since this forum is the world headquarters of crimping, I should also mention that I have done some extensive experiments with UltraEdit as a possible note-taker. It's a slick program (I especially love the elegant tiling of multiple files), but it's big and powerful and seems to contradict my aim of looking for a simpler solution. Again, has any here used it mainly for taking and organizing notes, or do I just have to accept the fact that it's a heavyweight piece of software intended for programmers?

Bill

Another plain text note-taking option is the original two-pane outliner, Treepad Lite:

http://www.treepad.com/treepadfreeware/

It's free works great... I think it is better than the paid, fancier versions of Treepad.

Steve

I like Notetab quite a lot - use it everyday for text editing. What I don't do anymore is use the outlining ability for notes.

Originally I used the outline for work notes and tasks to plan vacations for clients. It was very good for that purpose plus the outline could be exported to Bonsai.

There are two reasons why I stopped: 1) searching for text was too tedious as compared to a database such as AskSam. You have to go through each match one by one. 2) Managing completed work notes or just large number of notes became cumbersome.

Notetab in outline mode did very well for me in helping create notes on 1 topic - as in 1 topic per outline.

I would second the suggestion to check out Brainstorm. NoteTab and Brainstorm offer two different ways of accomplishing plain text notes in an outline layout.

Steve

Steve wrote:

searching for text was too tedious as compared to a database such as AskSam. You have to
go through each match one by one.

I take your point, and this is a matter of some concern, because I am assembling a lot of notes for a book. I'm sure that I would miss the Boolean searches in MyInfo if I were to switch over to NoteTab. On the other hand, I think that if I were to break down the notes for a single project into several files (since NoteTab searches in either one file or across several files simultaneously), that might reduce the clutter of hits.

The other limitations of NoteTab that trouble me a bit are (1) no multiple undo's and (2) no live spell-checking.

But (as I keep reminding myself) NoteTab (1) has been around for a long time and is solid and stable; (2) it is elegantly simple; and (3) the outline files are just a variant of plain-text files and hence readable (in an emergency) by other programs if renamed with a TXT extension.

Bill

Hi other Bill! Sounds like you could do worse than KeyNote (the revised NF version). Although it doesn't quite match your minimalism, you can search across notes, in one note (= one outline tree), you can keep notes as plaintext, etc. etc. Search results are listed in the right-hand pane, so you can pick and choose. It's very stable, because it's been around a long time. And you can certainly customise it to be extremely minimalist, if that appeals to you!

The Guide also has a nice set of search options (separate search "hits" window), and is close to my ideal in terms of sheer minimalism (while retaining rich text, which I do think is nice to have, as long as it's not too intrusive).

Cheers,
Bill

Crimping strikes again! I really do appreciate all these suggestions (and am investigating them), but at this stage, after having looked at and tried out a zillion note-taking programs in recent years, I'm trying to narrow down (not enlarge!) my search. Specifically, I'm curious whether anyone on this forum has had any experience, good or bad, in using NoteTab -- and possibly UltraEdit -- as a note-taker. Other recommendations will be cheerfully received, but I'm making a serious effort to focus on one or two possibilities right now.

Bill

I used UltraEdit for years before switching to a Mac and it's the only piece of software I miss. I loved it. I can't remember what the keystrokes are now, but if you highlighted a word in a file, and pressed a certain keystroke, it would search for that word in all the files in a folder and list the result in a window at the bottom of the screen. Then, if you clicked on one of the results in the list, UltraEdit would open the file at that place.

I'm not a programmer, so only ever used UltraEdit for editing text but it was great. I used it for GTD -- one file contained a project on each line with a Next Action under it along with a code for a context (@ca etc); I could then search for all Actions for a particular context. I used it for my Contacts -- one file containing all contact information. I used it for contact history as well. So, if I did a search across files in a folder for a particular person, it would bring up that person's contact details in my Contacts file and every line in my contact history where that person's name appeared. Wonderful. It was also fast.

Before I discovered UltraEdit, I used NoteTab (recommended on the web by Jacques Turbe if anyone remembers him). NoteTab paled in comparison to UltraEdit.

I now use TextMate on the Mac which has the same search capability. I assume a lot of high-end editors have the same feature.

Of course, I haven't used UltraEdit for about three years, so things may have changed.

I do think there is a live spell check script that someone wrote. If you peruse the http://www.notetab.com/ website you'll find links to many scripts. Also, there are a couple of active groups on yahoogroups.com with lots of files to download to enhance NoteTab.

The Pro version has multiple undo levels.

Steve, I'll look at the clip collections more carefully than I have so far.

I'm afraid I've ruled out NoteTab Pro, because it does not support variable-width fonts.

Bill

I've decided to wait until I have a small research project (i.e., not a book), and then I'll try using NoteTab for the note-taking. If anyone's interested, I'll be happy to report back on my experiences.

Thanks again for all the advice and comments.

Bill

Bill, just wondering whether you had the opportunity to try out Notetab the way you were considering. I'm looking into text editors within the context of the Cyborganize workflow.

Alexander Deliyannis wrote:

Bill, just wondering whether you had the opportunity to try out Notetab the way you
were considering. I'm looking into text editors within the context of the
Cyborganize workflow.

-----------------

I am still intrigued by the possibilities of NoteTab, but I haven't yet tried to use it for a writing project.

I like that it is plain text; it's extremely simple; and it feels transparent and doesn't intrude itself between me and my notes -- i.e., I just use it and don't have to think about it at all. I also find the cross-note links work very smoothly.

On the other hand, the search capabilities are primitive (no Boolean searches, just a sequential movement through all the occurrences of a word or phrase), and the outlining feature doesn't really allow multiple levels of indentation. (I've tried putting "--" or "----" before some topics in the outline, but that doesn't work terribly well.)

I suspect that for a short writing project -- an article, say -- NoteTab would be fine as a note-taker; but for something longer, such as a book, it doesn't have sufficient complexity or depth. So, for the moment, I continue to use MyInfo for my serious note-taking that is supposed to lead to a longish piece of writing; I use Evernote for miscellaneous bits of random information (mostly stuff I find on the Web); and I use NoteTab for short lists (addresses, passwords, etc.) and for writing first drafts.

Mark, thanks for the heads-up in EmEditor outline plug-in. This is powerful stuff.

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!

I used Notetab for notes utilizing its outline mode. It worked well, especially if you use the scripts users created over the years. Searches are better then most text editors I've used plus if you want there is the "Regular Expressions" option.

I don't use it anymore for extensive note taking. Primarily because the searches are like all the word processors or text editors I've tried - one result at a time. Notetab is still my text editor of choice for all other related functions. The reformatting of text or .csv files is a favorite of mine. The outline mode is used more of text storage for information what is best displayed that way.

What replaced it is AskSam and Brainstorm.

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

--------------------

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!

Looking for a similar program for Linux, I found Juffed http://juffed.com/en/index.html which also works in Windows. The main feature I require is 'save session' so that I can keep my text files in groups.

WSP wrote:

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

Clarification: The main feature I require (and found in Textpad and Juffedit) is 'save session' so that I can keep my text files in groups.

Just a small postscript to this thread.

In doing some further experiments with UltraEdit as a possible note-taker, I noticed that it works very nicely with Notebooks for iPad/iPhone. Notebooks is, except for Evernote, the most sophisticated note app available in the iOS world: each note is a separate file, and it can handle plain text, RTF, HTML, and PDF. Like a number of other iOS apps, it now offers synchronization through Dropbox. It also provides a number of other functions, such as list-making, that I haven't tried out so far. It's visually attractive and works very smoothly.

The developer, Alfons Schmid, has now announced that he will release PC and Mac versions of the program later this year:

http://www.alfonsschmid.com/Notebooks/Blog/Entries/2011/12/21_Outlook_2012.html

I'm keeping an eye on this. I like the idea of an app that creates small individual files (Evernote's monstrous single file makes me nervous) in standard formats that can be viewed and edited in numerous programs.

WSP,

Thanks for the heads up about the PC/Mac version of Notebooks. I have just started using it on an iPod Touch and it is a fine application, which should be terrific as a desktop program.

Steve Z.

While I do like Notebooks for iPad/iPod as a note-taker, I think it has some serious limitations as an outliner. While it allows you to create hierarchies of notes by using "books" as folders and "notes" as items in folders, there doesn't seem to be a way to export and extract such a set of books and notes as a single document. If that were possible, it would be a superb mobile writing tool. (I did suggest this to the developer but this issue seems to be on a back burner somewhere).

One would think that this problem could be overcome by exporting to Dropbox and then by combining the exported text files somehow with another programme. However, if you need to sync between iPod and iPad as I do, it also exports a bunch system files, which muddy the waters. Plus whenever I opened an exported text file, it didn't have any paragraph breaks or even spaces after the end of lines, turning it into a mass of undifferentiated text that would just take a long time to organise.

Has anyone figured any better way to deal with the exported text files in Dropbox? In the meantime I'm just sticking to emailing individual notes to myself, which is a shame, as exporting an entire directory would be just such a neat way to work on large projects in iPad.