I love Bear. It has one of the best Markdown editor out there, but doesn't much int he way of structuring/organizing notes hierarchically (the nested tags get clumsy fast). This lead to CRIMPing whenever I wanted to organize my notes visually or in a hierarchical manner.

I love Workflowy, and iThoughtsX, but their weak Markdown editing (you can get some MD capabilities in Workfloy w/ Chrome plugins) capabilities leave a lot of be desired. This lead to CRIMPing whenever the lack of MD features caused frustrations while editing nodes/notes.

To solve this, I split Bear and Workflowy/iThoughtsX on a single screen and just linked between the two. I org ideas w/ short headers in Workflowy/iThoughtsX and link to notes/details in Bear. It has worked almost seamlessly and has killed lots of frustration/CRIMPing w/o being too clunky.

I strongly recommend the MM/outliner + Bear combo on Mac!

Any simple software combinations like this that have cured some major CRIMPing for you?

Great use case -- thanks for sharing. I pretty much avoid software these days that does not support item links (custom URLs) that allow directly linking between a note / task / document / whatever from one application to another. I'm regularly cross-linking DEVONthink / Curio / OmniFocus and other applications. Nothing should exist as an island, IMO.

kjxymzy wrote:

Any simple software combinations like this that have cured some major
CRIMPing for you?

I don't like links.

My experience is Links are fragile objects. They don't persist a couple of years. If I want to replace one of those applications with another application, the links break.

My preference is to assign tags on individual notes (intext tags; or Mavericks tags)---and, then connect those notes with the same tag by some means (the Search in Devonthink) or Agents.

Agree. This is a risk.

I'd love to implement a tagging scheme like you mention, but I know myself well enough to recognize I would stop doing it in a few days.

Though I'm willing to take the risk because my my coding skills are sophisticated enough that if the links were ever to break, it would probably be a half day project to *link* everything back up or automate an ad hoc tagging scheme.

Dellu wrote:

I don't like links.

My experience is Links are fragile objects. They don't persist a couple
of years. If I want to replace one of those applications with another
application, the links break.

My preference is to assign tags on individual notes (intext tags; or
Mavericks tags)---and, then connect those notes with the same tag by
some means (the Search in Devonthink) or Agents.

Dellu wrote:
I don't like links.
>
> My experience is Links are fragile objects. They don't persist a
couple
>of years. If I want to replace one of those applications with another
>application, the links break.
>
>My preference is to assign tags on individual notes (intext tags; or
>Mavericks tags)---and, then connect those notes with the same tag by
>some means (the Search in Devonthink) or Agents.
>

One scheme I use daily that works kind of like the tag-matching you mention is the interface between Cloze CRM and Evernote. Cloze is like a contact manager that lets you see all of your recent interactions with a person or within a project (basically a group of people) in one list. I like it better than alternatives because it shows my phone calls and text messages as well as emails.

It also shows relevant Evernote notes for a person or project. So if I click on "Joe Schmoe", I get a list of all my calls, emails, meetings, texts to Joe as well as every EN note that has the phrase "Joe Schmoe" in it. It seems to be smart enough to include "Tom" for "Thomas," etc. It does a shockingly good job. I have been really surprised at how well it does at finding my EN notes for each person. This is no mean feat as I have 9,700 EN notes and many are quite long and include big PDFs with indexed contents. I emailed with the developer and they said they do an overnight index of the EN database every night. (Yeah, I know, privacy concerns, etc.). Presumably they have a way to only process recent changes instead of the whole thing every night.

One cool thing about this that 1) I've put absolutely no effort into it, except making sure to spell people's names right in EN. and 2) Cloze could implement the same thing with Simplenote, Ginkgo, or other solutions if EN goes away.

Regarding the topic of the original post: have you tried Ginkgo? It has outlining with excellent MD support.

Yeah. It is wonderful when apps work together without much friction. I have a custom CRM in Airtable, so I might explore linking from there to Bear (there might also be a solid way to link to a search like you noted w/ Evernote versus direct linking to a specific note.

On Gingko:

Yes! Love Gingko. I tried using it for notes, but I do a lot of notes for coding, and the lack of syntax highlighting and regular highlighting got in the way of my workflow. Also, the cards are too small for code without line wrapping. Still use it for journaling and non-trivial writing output. It is one of the few apps where you can do outlining/writing in one place without much friction. It has been hard to actually write in most mind maps/outliners software I have tried, as paragraphs/snippets as nodes (versus headers/short text as nodes) feel heavy to me.

Now that I have started linking, I could perhaps try using it for high level notes with Bear holding low level details.

dan7000 wrote:

>Dellu wrote:
>I don't like links.
>>
>> My experience is Links are fragile objects. They don't persist a
>couple
>>of years. If I want to replace one of those applications with another
>>application, the links break.
>>
>>My preference is to assign tags on individual notes (intext tags; or
>>Mavericks tags)---and, then connect those notes with the same tag by
>>some means (the Search in Devonthink) or Agents.
>>


One scheme I use daily that works kind of like the tag-matching you
mention is the interface between Cloze CRM and Evernote. Cloze is like a
contact manager that lets you see all of your recent interactions with a
person or within a project (basically a group of people) in one list. I
like it better than alternatives because it shows my phone calls and
text messages as well as emails.

It also shows relevant Evernote notes for a person or project. So if I
click on "Joe Schmoe", I get a list of all my calls, emails, meetings,
texts to Joe as well as every EN note that has the phrase "Joe Schmoe"
in it. It seems to be smart enough to include "Tom" for "Thomas," etc.
It does a shockingly good job. I have been really surprised at how well
it does at finding my EN notes for each person. This is no mean feat as
I have 9,700 EN notes and many are quite long and include big PDFs with
indexed contents. I emailed with the developer and they said they do an
overnight index of the EN database every night. (Yeah, I know, privacy
concerns, etc.). Presumably they have a way to only process recent
changes instead of the whole thing every night.

One cool thing about this that 1) I've put absolutely no effort into it,
except making sure to spell people's names right in EN. and 2) Cloze
could implement the same thing with Simplenote, Ginkgo, or other
solutions if EN goes away.

Regarding the topic of the original post: have you tried Ginkgo? It has
outlining with excellent MD support.

@dan7000

Just played with Gingko and Bear linking => quite powerful

Instead of the fragile URL schemes like someapp://link-to-note/, I assign an ID to everything of value, like 201802271633 (for 16:33 today), optionally with precision to the second. These go into the file name of notes. If in doubt, you can fire up Spotlight to search for them manually. More convenient are apps that support linking items by name, so that the ID is part of a clickable link with the app's URL scheme. Then you have the best of both worlds: a link to click on for speed and convenience, and the ID for longevity should you decide to switch apps.

-- Christian

YMMV, of course. Over here, most of the links I use are x-devonthink-item:// links that crank open databases, or groups, or specific documents. Since I never throw anything important away, and DEVONthink is smart enough to open a database if it's not currently open, I've managed to have robust links that have survived for 10 years.

Christian's approach is fine, but takes a lot of time. (Though Keyboard Maestro could help with that.) In a pinch, Houdah Spot or Find Any File are good supplements to vanilla Spotlight.

Dellu wrote:

I don't like links.

My experience is Links are fragile objects.

Having said that, it's high time the whole file system interface in all "modern" OSes was upgraded, as I've been arguing for a long time.

You should, after all, just be able to start typing into something like Spotlight and instantly be given a list of files/e-mails/whatevers that match what your typing, ideally ranked according to relevance or with easy filters that can be instantly applied.

But Spotlight/Windows Search/Whatever already does that, you'll cry!

No, they don't, or they really don't do it well.

Spotlight, for example, is better than it was (now with nice previews) – but why on earth can't you enlarge the window? If you're speedily leafing through file previews, you need a big window. The tiny little unchangeable windows it's currently got just isn't acceptable for preview, and of course there's no built-in file management functionality - you have to open everything up in Finder if you want that. It's not thought-through, so it's nowhere near as useful as it should be. Grrrrrr.

Here's my call to programmers: rise up, revolt against 1990s file systems! It's time to rewrite the computer's front end!