Caret with Chrome for cross-platform work with plain text files

Posted by Dr Andus
Jan 23, 2016 at 02:07 AM

Here is a tip for working with one or more plain text files across multiple computers and platforms that have Chrome installed (including, and especially recommended, if you’re a Chromebook user).

1. Install Chrome (if you don’t already have it).

2. Install the app Caret from the Chrome Web Store (as you will see, it has glowing reviews as one of the best text editors on Chrome):

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/caret/fljalecfjciodhpcledpamjachpmelml

3. Sign up for a Google Drive account (if you don’t already have one).

4. Download and install Google Drive Sync on your PC (I presume there is one for Macs too).

5. Launch Caret, open a new file, and save as a plain .txt file directly on Google Drive.

6. While you’re at it, customise Caret by choosing a theme (I like “Idle Fingers”, a nice dark theme) and other options in “User Preferences.”

7. Start writing, and keep saving. As long as there is an internet connection (or the next time the machine connects to the internet), the local copy of the file will be automatically synced with the Google Drive cloud.

Now, the beauty of this setup is that once you have opened the same file(s) in Caret on your other machines, it will automatically reopen them in a tab and updates them to the latest version pulled from Google Drive, every time you launch the app on any of those machines.

This means that you can keep working on the same document across multiple machines for as long as you like (months, if necessary), without having to look for the file and having to reopen it and sync it manually.

Let’s say you started working on it on a Windows laptop, you went to bed, wanted to add to the text, you can just reopen it in a Chromebook and carry on typing.

The only thing to be careful about is if the text file gets too big (over 1MB), then the syncing might take a bit longer, so be careful not to shut down the machine in the middle of that or alter the file on another machine in the meantime, as that might create a conflict and some text might get lost.

I only ran into that problem if I was too eager to shut down my Chromebook (it can shut down and boot so quickly, around 4-6 secs, that one can get trigger-happy shutting it off), without letting the big file sync properly.

Google Drive Sync does display an indicator in the System Tray (in Windows) or in the File Manager (in a Chromebook), so you can keep an eye on that to make sure the sync has completed.

This system thus works best if the files are kept under 1MB (which is quite a lot of text in a plain text file anyway).

Google Drive keeps older changed versions for 30 days, so they can be restored, which is another nice feature. And all of the above is free.