FoldingText + Editorial

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Posted by MadaboutDana
Jul 31, 2016 at 06:19 PM

I’ve been pining for an iOS version of Outlinely for a while now. I like the desktop version of Outlinely very much; it’s very quick to use, quite flexible, and it’s easy to move items from one part of the outline to another. It is, in short, a great way to keep Workflowy-style lists for task management.

But there’s still no sign of an Outlinely for iOS, and Robin still hasn’t unveiled his plans for OutlineEdit for iOS, so I started casting around in some frustration for another solution.

And found it in a slightly unexpected quarter: FoldingText, from the somewhat eccentric developer of TaskPaper, combined with the extremely powerful Editorial on iOS.

Both of them can access Dropbox, and both of them understand the same hybrid syntax (not entirely consistently, but that’s okay – highlights and comments work, for example). Above all, both of them allow you to fold sections of text under headers, which is such a useful feature. And both of them understand GitHub task list syntax, which is extremely useful. They don’t implement it quite as well as other apps (e.g. 1Writer on iOS, Outlinely on MacOS), but they do implement it.

I’m kicking myself for not finding these things out earlier! Now I have a nice, folding text editor combination on multiple platforms that’s aesthetically pleasing (sorry, but I simply can’t get on with these horrible text editors preferred by programmers with their DOS-era looks, ghastly colours and numbered lines - there, I’ve said it!), that supports focusing and tagging, and can sync very rapidly over Dropbox. Editorial has deserved a powerful desktop companion for a couple of years, and FoldingText is perhaps the nearest thing to a directly comparable app.

Perhaps this will help somebody else!

Cheers,
Bill

Posted by Paul Korm
Aug 1, 2016 at 10:31 PM

Thank you for this, Bill.

I’ve been using several contributed TaskPaper workflows with Editorial for quite a while. These workflows enable Editorial to read/write and work with .taskpaper files—“TP Due Date”, “TP Mark due and available”, and “TP Focus on Tag…”. Includes folding, a la Folding Text.

Editorial does a better job with TaskPaper, IMO, than the official macOS versions written—including TaskPaper 3.

The downside, maybe, with Editorial is that it hasn’t had an update for over a year—but Editorial’s author, Ole Zorn, did recently upgrade his Pythonista app which I think is a good indicator that Editorial will be next on his list.

Posted by MadaboutDana
Aug 2, 2016 at 09:16 AM

I agree, Editorial TaskPaper is actually better than the original. One of the frustrating things about TaskPaper, and the reason I no longer use it, is that it doesn’t support any kind of Markdown.

FoldingText is actually a much more powerful and flexible product than TaskPaper, and I’m slightly surprised that the developer has chosen to refocus on the latter. But it’s true that TaskPaper has gained a level of traction that FoldingText has never managed to acquire (possibly because of the rather robust pricing for what is, when all’s said and done, a text editor; but BBEdit is also robustly priced, so clearly there’s a demand for such things).

I’ve briefly tried using Scrivener as a task management system. On iOS, it’s actually quite viable, but the desktop app is the crunch point - it’s just a bit too heavyweight to be usable in this particular way, although regular users of Scrivener could easily take advantage of that functionality. I don’t spend enough time in Scrivener to make this a reasonable solution, unfortunately.

Posted by Dominik Holenstein
Aug 6, 2016 at 06:57 AM

I am using *.taskpaper files together with Editorial (on the iPhone) and with Sublime Text v3. First, I considered to buy the TaskPaper App but it is available for OSX only. So I decided to buy Sublime Text 3 because it is available for WIN and OSX. The *.taskpaper files (and others) are stored in a Dropbox folder.

These are the packages I have installed in Sublime Text v3:
- PlainTasks to open and edit *.taskpaper files
- Markdown Preview (allows you to preview and print a markdown (and *.taskpaper) file via your browser)
- Markdown Editing

Sublime Text v3 is more expensive than TaskPaper but it is a text editor for many use cases. It’s main focus is on web developers but it is a great editor for writers and note taking as well. I am currently using it on WIN and OSX.

Regards,
Dominik

Posted by Paul Korm
Aug 6, 2016 at 01:45 PM

@Dominik—agree with all you wrote. Also, the Plain Tasks package in Sublime Text does folding, and Plain Tasks has a lot of other features that have never made it into the official TaskPaper app—for example, Plain Tasks can be used for time tracking, which, as far as I know, has never been part of TaskPaper. For new users of Plain Tasks, look at the Tutorial in Plain Tasks’ Package Settings. Plain Tasks has been around for almost 10 years, I think, and TaskPaper’s paid versions have never caught up with it. Just my opinion, of course.

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