In the process of converting my hundreds of Clarisworks documents into Evernote and Dynalist files (thanks for the latter recommendation), I'm realizing that there's a feature of Clarisworks that I'm missing in both of them, as well as Microsoft Word: bare bones word processing that doesn't automatically clutter me up with annoyingly unnecessary formatting.
As a matter of fact, I often open up a new Clarisworks document to *completely strip* formatting from a block of text.
So many times, when I'm trying to copy something into Evernote, the text will get all snarled up with HUGE headline fonts. I fix that text only to have it happen again on the next line of text. Exasperating! I do not want to spend all my time editing out formatting that I never wanted in the first place, especially when I'm trying to grab text in a hurry.
Ditto with Dynalist. If I want to type a series of underscore characters there, to indicate a blank space in text that needs to be filled in later --arrgh I suddenly get italics. I do use the italics feature in Dynalist, but I don't always want it. I also wish I could copy and paste text more efficiently in Dynalist. I can only copy and paste one line at a time.

By the same token, I have no use for task-management-style checkboxes or other fussy features cluttering up the document. Looking for clean, clean, clean. Just the text, ma'am, and nothing but the text.

Any recommendations for software that would do that, without a Swiss Army knife of features popping up and getting in my way? It would be great if it were an outliner, but that's not absolutely necessary.

Give Obsidian a try. Or you could try Notebooks, which gives you a choice of three document types when you create a new one:

- Formatted (which is HTML)
- Markdown
- Plain text

Sometimes, the easy way is through a third program - a plain text editor like Notepad++, Gedit, or even Simplenote. Paste your formatted text into the text editor, which strips out embedded codes. Copy and paste again into your intended program.

Tiggerlou wrote:

As a matter of fact, I often open up a new Clarisworks document to
*completely strip* formatting from a block of text.
So many times, when I'm trying to copy something into Evernote, the text
will get all snarled up with HUGE headline fonts. I fix that text only
to have it happen again on the next line of text. Exasperating! I do not
want to spend all my time editing out formatting that I never wanted in
the first place, especially when I'm trying to grab text in a hurry.

There are functions to clean up formatting in Evernote. Within a note right click and select Simplify Formatting (Ctrl+space) or Remove Formatting (Ctrl+Shift+space)

Thanks for these suggestions!
I'll keep my eyes out for any other comments on this topic.

BrainStorm? You cannot do anything but plain text, but it does have some clever and useful features.

http://www.brainstormsw.com/

Jon

On Mac?

Try Opal

http://www.a-sharp.com/opal/

A bare bones but highly function outliner you should consider is Taskpaper:

https://www.taskpaper.com

thanks!!

One of the most elegant solutions is WriteMonkey, which is a markdown-based outliner/text/word processor.

Now available for Mac, Windows and Linux (http://writemonkey.com/wm3/

If you want full access to all the plugins, you can make a donation, but even the base app is very powerful.

Otherwise there’s always the charming Bean, a micro word processor that’s actually very enjoyable to use and still under development (it’s been around for ages!). Despite its simplicity (and tiny footprint), it has some surprisingly advanced features (e.g. columns, templates), but doesn’t support footnotes or stylesheets. It’s not an outliner, but it has a quick and simple file access navigation bar, so can be used as a kind of simple authoring tool.

Cheers,
Bill

If, however, you want REALLY bare-bones, there are a couple of other options:

Cloud Outliner (simple or Pro), available on the Mac App Store (and App Store – it’s macOS/iOS)

CarbonFin Outliner (available on App Store only – otherwise it’s a web app)

And I’ve just been checking out a new app, SpringNotes (macOS/iOS), which is a neat idea but still has a few bugs. But it’s very straightforward!

Cheers,
Bill

I'm a big fan of plain text files (along the lines of todo.txt and the whole plain text productivity movement) but I do love outlines.

Notepad++ (which is not a word processor, but a pretty excellent plain text editor) can be used a simple outliner. Not fancy in any way. It has features specific to a whole bunch of programming languages. If you just select YAML as the language, it's a decent plain text outliner that can collapse and expand at any level.
One nice feature of it is that the plain text files it saves still maintain the outline structure with indents, as opposed to some fancier outliners when they export outlines as plain text. Exporting as plain text makes it easy to paste into an email or any document, and avoids the issue of compatibility of the file with colleagues who may not have the same software.