Looking for information manager that combines strengths of X1, Evernote, TreeProjects, GloboNote, My Notes Keeper, Clipboard Help & Spell,

Posted by 22111
Nov 13, 2014 at 01:34 PM

Don’t bring down your selection to the “instant note” feature; as said, a short macro would go to your PIM, create a new item in its “inbox” part”:

assign a shortkey to:
go to (ever-running) PIM (high-brow macro languages can do this without your minimized PIM becoming visible: you just see the inbox(es))
go to parent item called “0”, on top of the tree (or if there are several trees in tabs, go to the “inbox” tree/tab)
show an input box (you can have two very similar macros instead, but the following is much more elegant)
if your very first char you type is a dot, your input will become the title of the new item (here, it’s written in a variable first),
and after your “enter”, a second inbox will appear for your note (which you will close with a “shift-enter”, so “enter” will remain available for note’s paragraphs; your input goes into a second variable)
else (no leading dot): your text is considered the note’s text (closing the note by “shift-enter” as before, and your text goes into variable 2),
and the macro will create the note’s title from precise day and time (with seconds; you will revise these unique but quite meaningless titles in a row, afterwards, this title goes into variable 1)
THEN (in both variants):
the macro will create the new item as (another) child of the “0” parent item, with title from var1 and text/content from var2
and the macro will hide the PIM again (in case the macro language had not been able to work on the minimized PIM anyway) and revert back to the application you had worked when you had triggered the “quick note” shortkey

I don’t know of any current PIM creating items as files, except for some exotic ones that all do just .txt files, i.e. don’t allow for formatted content, which is unacceptable; it’s quite ironic some PIMS create such distinct files on export, though, but replicating their tree structure to/within a folder structure (root item becoming parent folder, level 1 items becoming first-level folders in that, with level 2 items becoming sub-folders of the respective level 1 folders, and so on), “hoping” that other PIMs will be able to rebuild a tree, from this folder structure. (In a new-gen PIM described above, those distinct content files would NOT replicate the tree structure, but perhaps be stored by 1,000 or such, in different siblings folders; any tree classification would only be present within (multiple) trees.)

I’ve got a very high 3-digit number of ActionOutline files which I access from dedicated PM software, from the file system, as well as any other files, i.e. I both restrain the scope of any outline, and enlarge the “utility factor in different contexts” as much as possible, for any outline, as for any other file (pdf, Excel, Word/in fact Atlantis), i.e. I treat my outlines as “regular files”, as any other regular file, i.e. I try to maximize the wanted(-by-me) singularize-effect for outlines, too. (In the past, I posted lots of considerations on this subject here in this forum, my main point being that most pc users, perhaps more than 90 p.c., do NOT use dedicated outlines, but just do (at the very best) some outlining in Word, etc., so perhaps they are not all wrong, and our “outlining folly” might be some weird infatuation; my cutting up things, then recombining them again, in a “higher” sphere, i.e. by a file system PM tool, was done by my wish to revert my IM to something more “regular”, more “normal”.)

It goes without saying that even in a traditional “power outliner” like UR and such, you can replicate such a “sensibly-fractionized-then-recombined” system by heavy usage of internal linking resp. cloning “sub-parents” as children of “adoptive parents” elsewhere in the “big tree”, and then hoisting.

But, it’s interesting (or should I say, passionate?) to see that quite “flattened-out” IM tools like Evernote, CintaNotes (which has become both quite expensive (no more 10$, or 20$ for a lifetime license) and quite elaborate (but I have doubts about its capabilities vs. EN, but anyway, I consider its linking capabilities quite cute)), and even MS OneNote, seem to get incomparably more users than traditional outliners: This catenation/juxtaposition concept seems to please the “big number” much more than obviously does the hierarchies-brought-to-a-max concept (on this topic “flat vs. deep”, too, you can find some elaborations of mine in these threads here).

A personal note (anyone else’s mileage might radically differ): Since I’ve been “misusing” a (primitive) outliner (as said, AO) as “a better Word”, i.e. holding my outlines “short and flat”, but recognizing that for data, such dedicated outlines are much better though than, say, Word files in which you hamper with “formats” in order to get some “outline”, I’ve stuck to ONE system for quite some time now, and I’m always striving to optimize this system (by optimizing my file-system-based PM tool which overlays (and overlooks) those innumerable (outline, and all other) files), whilst in the past, I changed my IMS (including my own one, almost 20 years ago now) regularly, forth, even back, and to some third one, and endlessly so (= crimping); from my not-looking out anymore for some “better” commercial PIM, I deduct, just for me, that my concept of holding light compounds of data, but do a max for smartly combining these compounds in various ways, serves me best, or better at least than any other IM concept I ever tried before (and of course, the fact that seemingly 90 p.c. or more of people out there neither are into heavy outlining, confirms my perception of not doing entirely wrong, whilst traditional big-scale outlines always got me to miss the forest for the trees, or was it the other way round?).

Either way, you also need quick search results over it all, and as said, current index-building search tools do not search outlines: They simply refuse to index all files, big or small, with the respective suffixes. So what can you do?

A traditional PIM like MyInfo offers multi-outlines search in two flavors: over all currently opened MI outlines, and over all MI outlines within some directory; there are some other such PIMs, it seems, but not many: The otherwise much more robust* UR does not offer that often-asked-for “global” search (so you will be always tempted to create monster files in it). (*= “robust”, well, very unfortunately, MI, for me, never got rid of its bugs, or more precisley, always introduced new bugs for exterminated ones, and just some weeks ago, I trialled the then most recent version of it for a special, finite task (for which I needed cloned items) I was so fed up with doing it in askSam; well, it took me about 10 minutes of trying to have it shaped my task’s way (sorting by different of several attributes/columns), with just some 6 or 8 (empty) items, and it crashed again, and that had unfortunately be my experience in the past with MI, so I again discarded that application.

Also, UR’s (quite elaborate, since SQLite-based) search is not very robust, i.e. you never know if it displays all hits, or if it does not, and no user ever, over at their forum, really got to the intracacies of this UR “translation-for-the-user” of SQLite’s inherent search functionality (from which such missing of hits should very probably not arise originally) - the developer tries to be helpful, but perhaps he should have another very good look in those parts of his code? I really don’t know about it, but from my experience - and I tried really hard -, I would not advise to rely entirely upon UR’s search function.

Again, what can you do? Run FileLocator (Lite or Pro) on your monster file resp. on your several quite big files? Perhaps on an ssd? And perhaps you should buy Pro indeed, since you will need its “near” feature, in order for such an approach to make sense.

What do I do? (Remember, my (outline and other) files are small enough in order to not necessarily need that “near” keyword). First, FLP does not have “search in search results” (as invoked by me in a thread here dedicated to that refusal on the part of the developer). Second, neither FLL nor FLP (to which such functionality could of course have been restricted) search for European characters in my files (could be similar in UR, etc., but the same trick would apply), so if I want to search for a term like über (German for uber, ha, ha, ha), FL must search for \‘fcber, but then will find that word (and display it as such, with its context, in its hit table), the developer not being interested in integrating a simple transcription table into his code, while these encodings are standard rtf char codes though.

That’s the double reason why I always refrained from buying FLP, but of course, I’ve got respective AHK macros to translate my “über” to its above, FL-readable transcription, from my input box into the respective FLL text search field; of course, my not wanting to give the developer my money, takes away some functionality of that program for me, so perhaps one day I’ll overcome my reluctance to pay for this tool.

Now for the trick I’ve been going to share. Whenever I search for some search term combination, this would take 15 minutes: For about 6 gb of data, it had been some 6 minutes before; now that I’ve got my data on an external hdd (usb 2.0), these searches have almost tripled in time. That’s why I finally got interested in FL’s possible speed enhancements for me, and yes, the pro version only could work more speedily if I had got multiple cores, which I don’t (and which is a third reason in my case to not hand over my money to the unhelpful developer).

In fact, I advise you to click onto the help button to the right of the file name field (I previously only had been interested in “help” for the search term field, which was a big mistake of mine indeed): You will see that even (the current version of) FLL (so beware of a possibly more-crippled later one, cf. how Copernic Free had been more and more crippled from one version to the next, to the point of being crap today) is able to combine search scopes; let me give you a real-life example:

*.ao:0;ps*.ao

which means FLL will search in all .ao files, in the folder (and, if you want it to do so, its subfolders) specified in the “Look in” field, that either have “0” anywhere in their filename (= some inboxes), OR of which the filename begins with ps (a sub-range of files; in that help pop-up, the developer gives even more elaborate examples, incl. “not” (!)) - it’s clear as day from the above that (even) FLL (not speaking of FLP) is an invaluable tool for anybody who needs to search “non-standard” files, and as for me, my standard searches with FLL have come down to some perfectly acceptable 30 or 50 seconds again, and for anybody, with proper tagging within his or her file names, this should be a reasonable horizon, too: No need to search your car or your health files, let alone all your business things, if you just wanna look up some educational stuff for your family, but which might be put in some inbox or any one of 4 or 6 files out of perhaps several hundred (of that file type).

This “trick” is a classic example of continued overlooking the obvious, AND of so many people raving of some thing, but without giving reasons, without giving specifics.

To summarize, if (you think) you need very large files, try applications like UR and similar, together with FLP (and discard the former if the latter cannot read its file format), on an ssd, and if you think that a multitude lighter (but properly tagged) files are preferable, try some lighter applications, again with FLP (or FLL): As for the question if FL can, or cannot, read the respective file format, just open a copy of such a file within an editor and look for how characters are encoded, then search for exactly these (possibly weird) search terms.

You can always combine X1 (for the non-exotic stuff; well, I cannot since current X1 version does not work anymore with XP: waiting for WinTen) with FL, and yes, I left out dtSearch here (which would be your very first try if in case you’re willing to accept their asking price: I know about the possible irony to use a 30$ applic for processing your stuff, and then use a 250$ tool to search within that stuff, but such is life, right? It’s all about multiplied costs for the last mile of the journey. Btw, integrated dtS would be the ideal search component (which would even be available at a price) for the above-described newgen outliner, processing myriads of distinct files of all formats.).

It’s clear as day that in IM, there are different styles, and everybody should first identify the style he or she will be most comfortable with, then only decide upon the application combo least harmful to preserve that style to a max, to the point of deliberately renouncing features you originally might have considered mandatory, cf. my having temporarily done away with (single item and subtree) clones I had had in any former IMS, except for AO, to which I then went back from UR, in order to better adhere to my IM style I do better work in - ok, there’s my elaborate PM tool, too, without which (or similar) such nonchalance would not have been possible, but then, there are different tagging systems on the market, which can do a lot for anybody who’s trying to splice up into more manageable parts his or her perhaps currently too compact info and working material compounds.