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This week: Seen a post you love somewhere on the internet? Save it now, while you can. Two apps and two ideas for using plain text to solve everyday problems, including a distraction-free writing app, and plain text scripts to automate context switching on a Mac.
Scott Nesbitt was someone I found in various writing-themed forums in my early days seeking digital simplicity. I am currently studying his site, The Plain Text Project, and placing entries that resonate with me into Omnivore / Raindrop.
Why? Because katanist.com no longer exists, and I’m sad I didn’t take notes on the GTD with TaskPaper article on that site before it went down. Edit: Some kind and capable people have found the article for me on the Wayback Machine! So glad!
Also because I’ve found that Omnivore doesn’t always save the whole thing, and someone told me that Raindrop does. I’ve yet to confirm that. Edit: The SiteSucker app makes it easy to download entire websites. Thanks, Eric!
Scott has warned that while he has (at the time of writing) no plans to take down the site, don’t expect it to be there forever. You will likely find me referencing articles from his treasure trove for some time to come.
Here are four snippets I read on The Plain Text Project this week, with my thoughts on each.
Ignoring the techie side of this, it’s a nice example of One Big Text File (OBTF). The last updates were 7 years ago, so I have no idea if it still works as advertised. Still, seeing the simplicity of the human readable journal entries gave me a buzz!
I found Calmly Writer recently and it seems quite nice so far. I was able to open Markdown files on my computer (including in my Obsidian vault) and work on them. Here are some initial observations:
Pros
Cons
Calmly Writer is free for an unlimited evaluation period, and a cheap one-time purchase after that.
Brett Terpstra, father of nvALT, nvUltra, and Marked 2, has also created Bunch, “a macOS automation tool that takes a folder of plain text files containing lists of apps and commands to launch and provides an easy-to-use menu for triggering them.”
Cool as it looks, I haven’t used it yet. Putting it in my To Try pile for when the mood strikes.
Scott Nesbitt (of The Plain Text Project) suggests keeping a worklog rather than a time sheet. I don’t need a separate file for this as OBTF can handle it all, but I can see how people who need to report to other people on the progress of a project might find it helpful to have this kind of worklog in a separate file.
Next week — the power of the list. I’m preparing an overview of the main flavours of plain text task management. Like old-fashioned to dos made with pen and paper, but infinitely more flexible. Vanilla with toppings, nuts optional.
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