A change in mindset made me drop a lot of my tools

Posted by steve-rogers
Apr 16, 2022 at 07:28 PM

Dellu, interesting post thanks for sharing. I find myself undertaking a parallel reassessment of my own computing and information management habits. I have tried to pare down my tools as much as possible to stock Mac applications and whittle some of my recurring subscription costs. Like you, however, I find Devonthink indispensable for managing data and references and have even come to rely on it as a writing environment much of the time. I’m an academic scientist and DT is my research notebook and portal for primary literature that I collect and curate with Bookends. The outstanding search engine and decent PDF annotation tools have obviated my need for other PDF software, except for occasional cropping or labeling that I do in Preview.

I also tried to love markdown but use .rtf files for most notes that require formatting. A lot of the writing that I do is shared with students, collaborators, journals, or funding agencies and have to pass through Word or end up as a PDF, so the extra steps necessary to convert from markdown are a burden. Also many documents I write have to fit within proscribed page limits and often incorporate figures (plots, images). For writing within page constraints and placing figures, markdown makes no sense. I understand that there are some sophisticated tools for page layout, but the activation energy required to learn additional tools like Latex is too high and I find myself just firing up Word or Pages to get work done.