Plain Text

Posted by Derek Cornish
Dec 20, 2006 at 07:12 AM

Hi Daly,

There are a lot of good single-pane plain text editors around - free and shareware. Most are - not surprisingly - oriented towards programing, or use with markup (like html, etc), but also make excellent writing environments. As Wes says, EditPad Pro is a good one, and there is also a free version (Lite) with tabbed editing and multiple windows.

Once one moves into two-pane editors (aka outliners, notetakers, etc.) things get more complicated. File structure is more complex because of their topic+note structure. Users also want to styling and formatting, which means a rich-text editor. And the ability to store images, which means that file-size has to be kept down, and so developers start using compression.

With some exceptions, once one moves away from single-pane plain text editors, it is harder to work in plain text. NoteTab outline files and and InSight catalog files are still more-or-less plain text and very readable. WhizFolders, Jot+ and KeyNote files (to take some common examples) are somewhat less so because of file compression, rich-text and sheer complexity. The main practical drawbacks here are that one loses the simplicity of plain-text editing, and also that search software find it more difficult to index and display search results in a readable form.

As Wes points out, the same applies to Zoot at the storage level. Although Zoot uses plain text for editing, its *.zot files are quite complex, although much of the data is still in readable plain text. Although the files can be indexed and searched, though, it is often easier to output to html and search that file instead.

As I use Zoot for a lot of my data-collection, organization and planning, and as it only uses a simple plain text editor, it has made me think seriously about postponing all styling until much further down the “composition” road, until it goes into MS-Word for final formatting. Hence my interest in plain-text editors, especially those with the ability to produce plain-text topic+note outline files (like NoteTab or InSight). A possible way of working might be Zoot, Brainstorm (also plain text), NoteTab Pro, and finally Word…

There are other options though. As Ian Goldsmid said in June the new WhizFolders beta seems to offer the possibility of allowing Zoot items to be hyperlinked to WhizFolder nodes and notes. Since WhizFolders has a reasonably “kindly” writing environment, offers both topic+notes and conventional file formats, tabbed and multi-window editing, etc., this is probably worth exploring, too.

Sorry this turned out to be rather a screed…

Derek