Dear James, thanks for your thoughts. I came to the markdown territory because I want to rationalise my note taking. It is a bit off-topic but let me explain briefly because BBEdit is central to it. Until now I exclusively logged notes and tasks in plain text files in BBEdit.
All notes (work, hobby, family) of a day goes into an everything_log file (for the past 3 years the size is about 1.7 million words). It is fastest to find things in this file with BBEdit. (I also tried TaskPaper and it was quite fast with this big file as well, and it has a very nice tagging system, but no links). Certain notes belong to different projects, so I copy those notes into project-specific logs and I mark those notes with [logged in project1] etc.. However, there is a conceptual problem with this workflow: hardly any note belongs to only a single project. So I copy-paste many notes to several project logs. And there you see the extra work and time with this workflow. So, I decided that I need a new system where I need to enter everything only once and let related notes to be interlinked, so that I can follow connections. I don’t want to embed graphics or whatever in these logs, only link to them. Keep the notes still text based. Question: single (database like) file or notes as independent files? Single big files are very good for BBEdit and TaskPaper, at least for searching. But managing relationships would be difficult just only with tags, without links. If it is a single database of proprietary format, I would depend on one sw developer. If it is a big number of files of different sizes, I would need multi-file search in BBEdit to find things, but Spotlight and Devon could index the files too. Anyway, I was/am looking at many options: Tinderbox, Devonthink, Scrivener (have these), TheBrain (evaluating the trial), TaskPaper(evaluating the trial), Obsidian (currently there is a free version). All of these apps have pros and cons. Right now I see that Obsidian has a lot of potential (at least for my purpose; it is still in beta): uses plain text markdown files in my drive, renders .md even with custom CSS, has tags, links, map, no dependence on any server, etc.. I can edit a file in BBEdit, save and it is updated in the app. Of course I can browse over the internal .md files (in preview mode) but this does not work with external .md files. So, I am testing the possibilities with markdown files in general. Best, Tibor > On 2021. Apr 20., at 18:26, James Reynolds <[email protected]> > wrote: > > I've been watching this thread and because someone mentioned Joplin I tried > it out. I'm having so many problems with it I'm afraid of using it now. It is > constantly losing the undo history. When I performed an undo, it wouldn't > zoom to the location that was undid so I had to copy the before and after > text out of Joplin and put it in BBEdit to do diff to see what changed! I > even set BBEdit to the external editor and tried working exclusively that way > but if I did anything in Joplin at all it was just a huge liability. I can't > even see the point of using it now. I have to reread my entire document now > because I don't know what Joplin has done to my document. > > I think BBEdit has spoiled me because it has so many rock solid less-popular > features that I've used to work faster and be more productive but they don't > transfer to other text editors. And in this case I've learned to use undo and > redo to do maybe crazy things like navigate around my document and when I > tried it in Joplin it actually put my document in peril. > > I'll just add the only reason I tried Joplin is because I want something that > is like Apple's Notes but with Markdown, synchronizes to a cloud of my > choosing, and it runs on macOS, iOS, and Linux . It looked like Joplin had > all of those things. But yeah, I don't think it's going to work out. I'm > wondering if replacing Apple Notes is also the goal of the person who started > this thread. > > James -- This is the BBEdit Talk public discussion group. If you have a feature request or need technical support, please email "[email protected]" rather than posting here. Follow @bbedit on Twitter: <https://twitter.com/bbedit> --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "BBEdit Talk" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/bbedit/399725C0-8F6C-43BA-B962-84913F650FAE%40gmail.com.
