I'm getting towards the end of a very long history of medicine project, nearly a decade of research and writing, and for structural reasons I am going through an exercise of writing long extempore 'notes' on all of the aspects. It's working well - helping me re-think and make new connections - BUT none of the apps I currently use (on Mac) do quite what I want.

The length of these notes can run into 3 or 4 thousand in a few hours of writing, so I really need typewriter mode (so no Bear) and folding - I often find myself writing in sections (so no Ulysses or Scrivener). It'd be good to index these in DTPro too, so should I be thinking about a serious text editor of some kind that does both? Or are there other options?

Many thanks.

FoldingText and Byword come to mind.

Byword's typewrite mode is better than FoldingText's. Byword doesn't have folding but paragraphs and lines can be "focused" -- greying out the non-focused bits of the document.

FoldingText has folding and typewriter mode (sort of -- it's clunky). It's also abandonware -- typical for its developer -- but thus it is free.

Both can edit documents imported or indexed in DEVONthink.

How about OmniOutliner? It has typewriter mode, and allows for sectional writing via nodes.

It may not satisfy your DevonThink criteria though; the newer file format of OmniOutliner doesn’t seem to play so nicely with DT.

Paul Korm wrote:

FoldingText and Byword come to mind.

Byword's typewrite mode is better than FoldingText's. Byword doesn't
have folding but paragraphs and lines can be "focused" -- greying out
the non-focused bits of the document.

FoldingText has folding and typewriter mode (sort of -- it's clunky).
It's also abandonware -- typical for its developer -- but thus it is
free.
Both can edit documents imported or indexed in DEVONthink.

Many thanks for this. By coincidence I had just 20 minutes ago downloaded and started to play with Folding Text. I used the demo a for a while few years ago when it first came out, but as my needs then were different I never actually bought it. I was surprised to find it free today (although there's still a license process to go through) and I'll see how I get on with it.

I was going to add to my previous post that a companion iOS app would be useful as my starting ideas often come early in the morning just as the dogs are waking up, but being plain text FT solves that as well (I can use Drafts to start things off and 1 Writer to read and edit).

Thanks again.

I didn't know Folding Text was free other. So I just downloaded it. I know people have ranted about Jesse before, but this is close to a perfect editor. It has a lot of the org-mode things I always liked (select *sentence*, rearrange outline levels, move branches up and down, in addition to pretty sane editor commands generally). Thanks!

It doesn't help on the Chromebook, but on the Mac it's great!

Dr Dog wrote:

The length of these notes can run into 3 or 4 thousand in a few hours of
writing, so I really need typewriter mode (so no Bear) and folding - I
often find myself writing in sections (so no Ulysses or Scrivener).

The whole philosophy of longform writing in Ulysses is writing in sections, aka sheets.

Here are a couple of intro/comparison articles you might find useful:

https://zapier.com/blog/ulysses-markdown-writing-guide/

https://zapier.com/blog/ulysses-scrivener/

Although it sounds like you are looking for a text editor with folding, rather than an outliner, if you are open to outliners, you might consider Outlinely, which is an outliner that has Typewriter mode. It has both Mac and iOS apps.

satis wrote:

Dr Dog wrote:

>The length of these notes can run into 3 or 4 thousand in a few hours
of
>writing, so I really need typewriter mode (so no Bear) and folding - I
>often find myself writing in sections (so no Ulysses or Scrivener).

The whole philosophy of longform writing in Ulysses is writing in
sections, aka sheets.

Here are a couple of intro/comparison articles you might find useful:

https://zapier.com/blog/ulysses-markdown-writing-guide/

https://zapier.com/blog/ulysses-scrivener/

Thanks - I've had Ulysses for a long time, since it was the very different V.2, and I use regularly for certain kinds of long form writing that don't require the full Scrivener, but my present case is different and quite specific: it's definitely folding that I want as this is the way I used to work on exercises like this with an iPad Pro and the now apparently abandoned Editorial.

After a decade of very intensive research and writing (and working mainly in Tinderbox) and with the first draft for the publisher basically finished, I'm really just writing to see what is in my head, what new connections might have germinated in there and might still do during the writing process. I had though that this would actually be an analogue task, especially as I only took to digital half-way through my career, but I don't seem to be able to summon the hand energy and speed. So far Folding Text seems to be working quite nicely.

Thanks again.

Outlinely has both text folding and a typewriter mode.