Minimalist champions

Posted by jaslar
Aug 5, 2013 at 04:17 PM

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.