Plain text solutions for data organisation

Posted by JohnK
Feb 11, 2008 at 06:39 PM

Crikey. I leave my computer for a few hours, and I’m flooded with replies. I’m impressed and grateful.

Thomas—I like Treepad (I have a licence for the Enterprise edition - more over-engineering by me). I would be happy to use Treepad Lite but it uses a single and proprietary database, just like its grown-up relatives. As I said in my first post, I haven’t ruled that out, but I prefer the idea of a separate file per note.

Steve Z—I have never heard of PowerOutlines before. It’s always exciting when you come across something new! But it does seems very expensive for what it does (you would need at least the Pro edition to avail of decent search). And although it’s been going for almost a year, the user group has just 22 members (and that group also covers Insight). I’m getting an uneasy feeling…And single machine licences are a big no-no as far as I am concerned. I have three machines to feed.

Manfred—yes I have a licence for NoteTab too… but while it’s a good text editor, it’s not really designed for the level of organisation I’m looking for.

quant—It’s not that UR is slow for what it does. But I just want something with the reaction time of a good text editor, so that when I use shortcut keys to create a new note (Restore [program]—> New Note—> Paste—> Minimise [program]), it’s all happening at warp speed. Which is does with a good text editor. I’m also keen to simplify my system of preserving data (hence separate plain text files).

So far, I have been playing quite a bit with AM-Notebook (http://aignes.com/notebook.htm) and the more I play, the more I like it. Early days, but it’s not bad at all. One or two keyboard shortcuts missing, but I’ve built those with AutoHotkey. Other than that, no big holes so far.