What's your favourite minimalist outlining, writing, PIM or productivity application (in terms of interface and features)?

It must be in the nature of technological innovation and market competition that bells and whistles eventually result in sensory overload with many software. For this reason I tend to favour minimalist apps, whenever I have an option.

Here are my favourites:

- WorkFlowy (Win & iOS)
- the Outliner tool in ConnectedText
- Noteliner
- Classic Calendar
- Freeplane
- The Guide
- TreeSheets
- FocusWriter
- Nebulous Note (iOS)
- Everything search engine
- InoReader (RSS)
- Outliner Software (this forum)

Dr Andus

I personally don't really like the minimalist applications but I have a favorite browser based app for writing: Draft
https://draftin.com/

Here is the feature list:
https://draftin.com/features#versioncontrol

Dominik

Writemonkey! Though, there's currently a preview release that adds plug-ins, leaving me to wonder if it is going to remain minimalistic. Then again, they can always be disabled.

Also, TodoPaper/Taskpaper.

Dominik Holenstein wrote:

Dr Andus

I personally don't really like the minimalist applications but I have a
favorite browser based app for writing: Draft
https://draftin.com/

Here is the feature list:
https://draftin.com/features#versioncontrol

Dominik

i wondered if it was the same as Draft, the Android app which is the successor to Epistle -- link here:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mvilla.draft
I was thinking about getting this app for its Dropbox syncing feature, since Epistle no longer works for that.

draftin.com is something different - but it's a very attractive webapp.

jim

Allow for my mentioning two tools that I hold both in high respect:

XyWrite - generations of then well-paid journalists put all their texts into the keyboard with the help of this

KEdit - a very special folding editor, where the folding structure can be restricted or enlarged at your will; for some, it's the perfect one pane outliner

On the PC I remain addicted to NoteTab for much of my writing. It's a simple plain text editor with lots of tools you can use or ignore. It has a tabbed MDI so you can switch from document to document. Small footprint. I've been using it for probably 12 years now.

I can save my plain text files to Dropbox, then import them quickly and easily into a new favorite on my MacBook, Ulysses III. Maybe Ulysses III isn't exactly a minimalist app -- but compared with Scrivener it is. I can also write in the companion app for iOS, Daedalus, and sync back and forth. So I've now got a nice synergy among these three apps and devices, which is perfect for a recent project I've been working on.

I guess Brainstorm is a minimalist app, and I still find it useful, even though it hasn't been developed in years.

I would like FoldingText if it were further developed to improve some things about it. I like the concept, but it still needs work to be useful to me, and I am not sure Jesse Grosjean has the attention span to keep his focus on it.

Steve Z.

Another fan of Ulysses III and Daedalus here.

Those who enjoy minimalist apps and are seriously irritated by Catch's cop-out might be amused by quip.com

It sells itself as a word processor for mobile apps, but actually it's a collaboration-optimised notes tool - quite powerful, with an iOS app and an Android app in beta.

I've run across a couple of funny issues, but nothing serious. For collaboration purposes it's actually very powerful; very nice markup, very easy to share.

The interface is very minimalist but quite clever, and makes full use of the attractive iOS slide-in/slide-out thing.

Another iOS app I've just discovered, by the nice German developer who created TiddlyNotes for iOS, is 'As Noted', which is currently free and extremely good (syncs with Dropbox, imports Evernote notes, imports TiddlyWiki files...). Also pleasantly minimalist, but with hidden power. Am still investigating, but will report back with findings.

I should have included Fences, specifically the "double-click anywhere on the desktop to hide all icons," which I use all the time. Obviously it's only minimalist if you don't have some garish wallpaper :)

Lately, minimalist is the way I roll.

- Gedit. Text, word wrap, spell check, word count. Just about enough. Linux, Gnome text editor. I wrote newspaper columns in it for years. If it folded text, I'd probably still use it.

- tkoutline. A one page, cross-platform outliner/wiki. Don't use it as much as I used to.

- Notecase. Outliner on the left, Gedit-like text editor on the right. My workhorse on Linux and Windows.

- Plaintext. Two pane, plain text editor for the iPad. From Hog Bay. Pretty much handles long form writing, easily transferrable to anything. Syncs to Dropbox.

- Google tasks. It's just a list of to dos, and you can attach short notes and a date. Integrates with Google calendar, apps for any platform.

- Workflowy. Quick, elegant and powerful.

- Simplemind. Mind mapper for the iPad, Mac, Android, and Windows.

- Xmind. Linux and Windows.

- Evernote.

What all of these have in common is that the user interface just gets out of the way. It's perfectly obvious what to do with it, the functions take just a few minutes to grasp, and then it's just you trying to get something done.

I'm noticing a tendency here lately to go with cross-platform apps that make their data available through Dropbox. When I shift platforms, I just want to keep working on the document I may have started elsewhere.

While I like minimalist interfaces, I miss rich text in many of the most popular note-taking apps. Not least because as a translator, I need to view two documents simultaneously - something that's simply not possible in the vast majority of mobile apps, and increasingly difficult in many desktop apps.

I have a couple of favorite solutions. One is the vastly improved Microsoft OneNote, which now allows me to view OneNote pages properly on an iPad. This means I can put shorter texts side by side very easily - the iPad app's new "full-page" view is ideal for viewing them easily on the smaller iPad screen. The other is Apple's own Numbers, which I previously used as a OneNote equivalent. The import process was a bit trickier - where OneNote syncs smoothly with the desktop via SkyDrive, to get text into Numbers (without a Mac), I had to resort to opening documents in Pages and copying the text, then pasting it into a text box in Numbers. A rather cumbersome process!

I've also experimented with Circus Notebooks and Tapose (both capable of dual-pane display). Both are, alas, slightly less than perfectly stable, which can result in some infuriating moments. But I keep going back to Tapose in particular, because it's such a promising idea...

Alfons Schmid has promised to look into a two-pane version of Notebooks (where you could view two notes side by side; Notebooks is already a two-pane outliner), but he's got plenty of other things to focus on at the moment (beta releases of Mac and PC versions, for example).

There are, of course, a number of browser-based apps that also have note-taking functions, so are more or less two-pane in layout. But that's not really the same thing at all.

If anybody knows of other two-pane rich-text editors (or even just text editors; especially cross-platform editors), I'd be interested. Maybe that should be a separate thread. And suggestions for what to call two-pane editors would be appreciated, too. Maybe three-pane outliners (assuming they have some kind of navigation view as well)?

I like Notebooks - an illustration of the effectiveness of popovers and Markdown (which could be regarded as minimalist tools).

Two-pane PIM for Windows.

Jot Plus.

Trivially simple to learn/use. Uses rtf and supports Web links, but not tables or images (but has links to images)..

Regrettably, development is moribund.

Sorry, I've been using confusing terminology. I'm not talking about two-pane outliners (I've used and long discarded Jot+). I'm talking about two-pane EDITORS, i.e. editors that are capable of displaying two pieces of text side by side. That might equate to three-pane (or multi-pane) outliners (examples in Windows include InfoRecall, Smereka TreeProjects, MyInfo etc.). But the trouble is, all these powerful Windows applications don't have any cross-platform clients.

How about it, Yaroslav? What about TreeProjects for iPad? Or Android... ;-)

I'd be an instant customer (but you'd probably need a few more!).

jimspoon wrote:

I was thinking about getting this app for its Dropbox syncing feature,
since Epistle no longer works for that.

Check out Denote. I turned to it because Epistle had trouble with non-English characters. It syncs with Dropbox and has a minimalist interface.

My basic set up for note taking is indeed minimalist, and includes a suite of programs working with plain text files syncing via Dropbox (of course); I would prefer an encrypted solution like Wuala, but that will have to wait.

- Denote on Android
- Tea, TextRoom / pyRoom, FocusWriter, Gedit / Leafpad on Linux
- Tea, WriteMonkey / TextRoom, FocusWriter, Emeditor on Windows

In addition, the following programs are part of my cross platform toolbox. I tend to favour a tool if it can run on my tiny Eee PC 901 on Lubuntu. No bloatware allowed.

- Rednotebook journal
- Notecase Pro
- Outwiker
- currently trying out Zim Desktop wiki and VYM mind mapper

I failed to mention my main workhorse for working on complex texts without distraction: it is Brainstorm, mentioned already by Steve. I have actually set it up with DOS-era colours: bright yellow text on very dark blue background.

Brainstorm isn't cross-platform but runs in Wine and is very light on resources even with very extensive material.

I've been comparing various iOS writing apps to find out which one would be my minimalist champion in terms of ease and speed of use (on iPod Touch 4th gen. and iPad 1), accuracy and speed of typing, efficient use of screen real estate, and most importantly, as few distractions as possible.

Before the comparison my favourite was Nebulous Notes. I compared it with Daedalus, PlainText, and IA Writer. After the comparison the winner is... IA Writer. Each of those other apps are great for various reasons, but when it comes to just focusing on the writing, IA Writer came out on top for the above criteria.

Dr Andus wrote:

but when it comes to just focusing on the writing, IA Writer came out on
top for the above criteria.

Hm, while iA Writer still seems to have the best use of screen real estate and focus on the task of writing, it has one drawback. Without internet connection I wasn't able to open a previous document that I had saved to Dropbox (which is not good).

So I'll continue to use Nebulous Notes as the local notes storage and interface with Dropbox (as it has the best solution for keeping local notes and selectively syncing with Dropbox that I have seen), while iA Writer would be only used for writing, with immediate export to Nebulous Notes.