Software that's enjoyable ... software that's a drudgery

Posted by Marbux
Mar 4, 2015 at 05:44 PM

My software preferences have changed a lot after two events: [i] my retirement from legal practice; and [ii] the more recent Edward Snowden disclosures about the peeping Toms at NSA.

When I was practicing law, WordPerfect was the center of my computing universe because the only other choice was Word (the profession-specific apps were virtually all built on those two word processor’s APIs) and productivity is so much higher with WordPerfect.

Since retiring, Windows moved onto VMs and pretty much just gets used to run WordPerfect and Isys Desktop Search plus Ultra-defrag (I rank Isys as the greatest productivity enhancer since WordStar. The Isys owner, Ian, recently retired and sold to Lexmark, with the software renamed and now available from Perceptive Software, a Lexmark subsidiary).

Cross-platform or multi-platform software is pretty much a basic requirement for me now, other than those two. And the Snowden disclosures eliminated cloud apps that don’t feature end-to-end encryption. So I’m down to Copy for file sync (20 GB free) and Mega for off-site backups (50 GB free).

I now spend most of my days switching between the Chrome browser and the NoteCase Pro outliner, mostly running them on Linux Mint, although I’m transitioning from Chrome to the Tor Browser to generate more encrypted Net traffic for the NSA and DEA voyeurs to worry about.

I really like NoteCase Pro because: [i] it’s extremely powerful; [ii] it’s multi-platform; [iii] what it can’t do can generally be coded with Lua extensions using some 400 scriptable program commands (I’ve written somewhere between 450 and 600 extensions so far); [iv] it comes with a wide variety of node properties including custom properties that can be displayed and sorted in columns and be manipulated with Lua scripts; [v] it doesn’t tie you to your hierarchical structures, providing a flat in-memory list view of arbitrary groups of nodes; and [vi] it’s loaded with other features for overcoming the problem of data that needs to be in multiple categories.

On the latter, that includes hyperlinking, node clones (nodes with transcluded content of other nodes editable in either the clone or the original), node tags (double-click on a tag to list only the notes sharing that tag), etc. It’s also very nice that the developer, Miro Rajcic, is super helpful and that he releases updates about every two months.

What originally brough me to NoteCase Pro is that it can export all or parts of a document to a minimalist HTML with or without an automatically-generated and hyperlinked table of contents. That flavor of the HTML export is compatible with virtually all web editors that accept raw HTML input or pasting of formatted HTML and with Libre/OpenOffice and MS Word.

I also make fairly heavy use of:

* Geany text editor (multi-platform and extensible with Lua via a plugin)

* VLC (VideoLAN) multimedia player (multiplatform and extensible with Lua)

* Pandoc file format converter (multiplatform and exensible with Lua).

* Calibre ebook manager/viewer (multiplatform)

* Zotero web research assistant (multiplatform).

* Virtual Box virtual machine host (multiplatform).

As you might have guessed, I’m partial to software that is extensible with Lua. I maintain a web page listing and providing short descriptions of such software. https://sites.google.com/site/marbux/home/where-lua-is-used