Hi Andy, File Menu / Read/Write Files / Read-file-into-node will suck in the file you point it at. Leo won't understand a word file so start with your text files.Leo has a mini buffer command line at the bottom of the screen. This has command completion and you can type the command directly in there. Click in the buffer and type read-file and hit tab.
However a much more powerful tool is the active-path plug in. This can recursively read a whole directory into Leo nodes. Leo plugins are great. As regards your project you are starting in the right place - get all your files ordered first, and get them into plain text. Then Leo or some other tool can ingest them and allow you to move them round/sort them. Like you I'm no programmer or even much of a note organiser but here's my experience. Leo is fantastic, super powerful and free. And Edward (EKR the developer is the nicest man in show business) indeed this group is full of lovely helpful people. However you have correctly observed something about the group. A lot of users here are most interested in Leo as an IDE. On the other bits of software - DevonThink I have never tried I'm sure it is brilliant. Tinderbox is brilliant. And it offers to 'activate' your notes in an unique way. And you can enjoy the visual approach of the map view. But the pricing model puts me off. I can't get Leo to talk to Tinderbox via OPML - see posts below. I have recently downloaded The Archive - https://zettelkasten.de/the-archive/ and it is brilliant. It does about 5% of what Leo does but it lives and breathes notology. Free to try. Search and display are tops in The Archive. And in fact as it also deals with text files in a directory you can wrangle the same data in both Leo and The Archive for different purposes or until one becomes a preferred tool. have fun. IH On Saturday, 18 January 2020 23:36:36 UTC, andyjim wrote: > > Uh, complete newbie here, and I feel like I'm walking into a high end > programmers convention here and raising my hand red-faced to ask for a bit > of kindergarten help. Everything in this forum is Greek to me. I am NOT a > programmer. Repeat: I am not a programmer. > > My intended usage for Leo is organizing notes & ideas. I'm raising my hand > here because perhaps Leo's outlining/organizing capabilities may be what I > need. I'm hoping folks here can tell me if I'm even knocking on the right > door by looking at Leo. But it looks like Leo's flexibility in outlining > may be unsurpassed and may be what I'm looking for. Hope so. > > I've looked for years for a software to help me organize my notes and > ideas. Here's the problem: I've been journaling for 25 years, writing > thoughts, notes, ideas on probably hundreds of topics, and totaling > probably a few million words in a few thousand files. But I haven't done > much organizing. Most of my journal files have notes on multiple topics. > Generally my files are named by date rather than topic, though I have > perhaps a few hundred by topic. For years I wrote in Word, often using > outline format, usually writing most notes in one file per year, in outline > format. If you're concluding it's a mess, you are right (though it could be > worse). What's not in Word is mostly in text files. I switched to writing > in Vim a few years ago, and am now writing in Spacemacs. Org mode has been > recommended to me but I have not undertaken it. I suspect Leo is better > than org mode for my needs but who am I to know? Is it? > > My project, which will undoubtedly take a couple of years, is to class and > organize all notes into a "thoughtbase", perhaps comparable in some ways to > a Zettelkasten. I want to sort through the mess, clip notes out by topic > and organize them such that I can readily access anything and everything. I > hope to cluster topics under a few (perhaps 25) main headings, some number > of sub-headings, and individual topics with all notes on each topic stacked > together. > > Perhaps there's a book or two or three there, but to find such a book or > books will require that all this be organized so I can see it, access it, > massage it, move clips around, stack them up, try things, remember things I > wrote 20 years ago, .... Sound like fun? You don't have to answer that. > > My thought is to arrange all this in external plain text files initially, > with the outline organization being in Leo, leaving the files external > (eventually that is. Perhaps this isn't the best approach. But I'm getting > ahead of myself. My first question is (and I'm hoping I've given a somewhat > comprehensible thumbnail of what I'm looking for), is Leo capable of this, > or perhaps Leo in combination with other software? Maybe some of the > text-crunching and manipulating would be best done outside of Leo? BBEdit? > DevonThink? InfoQube? Zettelkasten? Eastgate's Tinderbox? Heck I don't > know. Oh yeah, MacOS High Sierra on an older (2010) iMac; just installed > Leo 6.1. > > One reason I'm looking at Leo for this is that I think I'm going to have > to just start bringing material into an outline system, note by note, and > evolve the classing and relationships 'as she goes'. I think it would be > too much to try to come up with the entire classing system out the outset. > Evolve it instead. And I suspect that is where Leo may outshine any other. > Is this true? Others claim similar qualities, where the optimum > organization emerges as you bring more material into the system and deal > with it as the spirit moves, piece by piece. Patterns emerge, relationships > develop, that sort of thing. That is ultimately what needs to happen. Is > Leo the best bet? Or some combo of software? > > In addition to some general thoughts on all this, I'd like a few pointers > to get me started. I have learned how to create an external file in Leo, > but I haven't found how to open/import a file (text or Word). That will be > a key function in putting together a thoughtbase. I'm sure Leo can do, but > I haven't discovered how to do it. > > Thanks, Andy > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "leo-editor" group. 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