Here's
an idea: instead of dealing with lots of different programs, formats
and files, why not keep all of your data – contact info, calendar, the
draft of your dissertation – in one mammoth text file? That's what
O'Reilly's Giles Turnbull
is doing, and it actually doesn't seem like that crazy an idea,
especially if you work on multiple machines. You only have to worry
about syncing one file, your data is platform-independent, and you can
easily pinpoint the info you need using anything from grep to
Spotlight. Of course, this one file won't include your email,
bookmarks, spreadsheets, photos, music or any other files that depend
on specific software. But for the rest of your stuff, why not shove it
all into one big file and let grep sort it out?
Tags: text+file, TextFile
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Comments
5
Subscribe to commentsmarkpAug 9th 2005 10:15PM
Before it got bloated/fragmented into too many things, Treepad was a simple application that lent itself very well to the "everything in a single file" idea. Maybe OPML will be useful for this as well...
AwaykenAug 10th 2005 10:41AM
This would be a great idea if Windows had "grep". :(
Kosi2801Aug 10th 2005 2:55AM
This approach (everything in one file) is exactly what TiddlyWiki (http://www.tiddlywiki.com) does but as an extremely interactive HTML page it's much more usable than a simple textfile and grep. At least in my opinion.
nick santilliAug 10th 2005 12:35PM
@Awayken:
Try WinGrep. Works like a charm!
http://www.wingrep.com/
Christopher MichaelAug 10th 2005 1:19PM
The Treepad idea falls down because it requires (besides, uh, purchase) the app to be installed on all client machines. TiddlyWiki is much closer to being the "it thing" since all it requires is a browser. It still seems a bit fragile, it won't run on less than full DHTML browers, wiki syntax isn't totally natural, and it requires a wikiword for each concept (not difficult/unreasonable, tho), but all that said, I hold a lot of hope for that app.