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NoteTab for note-taking
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Posted by WSP
Apr 17, 2011 at 02:32 AM
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
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Apr 17, 2011 at 02:49 AM
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
Posted by Steve
Apr 17, 2011 at 11:35 AM
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
Posted by WSP
Apr 17, 2011 at 03:08 PM
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
Posted by MadaboutDana
Apr 17, 2011 at 03:59 PM
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