nested display / editing of multiple small text files as a single document

Posted by jimspoon
Mar 20, 2015 at 08:59 PM

I would like to be able to put each note into its own small text file, but then be able to view and edit many notes (e.g. all text files in a folder) in a single continuous view. That way I wouldn’t constantly have to be navigating from one file to the next, and I could see the small notes in the context of the other notes I’ve made.

I haven’t had much luck with this and wonder if anybody has encountered any such thing.

I googled and found “Nested Editor - Specialized editor for structured documents” - http://nestededitor.sourceforge.net/about.html . In the feature list it says “Divide and conquer philosophy: every large document is composed of small documents.” But I couldn’t figure out how this is supposed to be accomplished.

I am also thinking of the “Master Document” kind of function in MS Word, also I think Scriviner has some such thing.

Also I seem to recall that Grandview had something like this - an outline item could be a link to an external outline which would appear at a particular node in the outline.

Resophnotes also comes to mind - you could save each note to a txt file, but I’m not sure they could all be viewed in a single continuous stream.

But I would want it to be rather seamless - the nested outlines / text files would appear in a continuous stream along with the other outlines/text files. And ideally, any text file added to a folder would automatically appear in the stream of all text files in the folder, in a single document/outline view.

Why would I want to do this? You’d have an integrated view of your notes, and it would easy to add to it from any mobile device, with the aid of Dropbox or some similar solution. And as the notes are contained in small separate files, you would minimize the problem of inconsistencies when trying to modify a large single database file from multiple devices.

Any thoughts or pointers?

jim