It gave me a simple syntax to divide my text files up into projects, tasks, and notes.
Foldingtext free#
I think being free to make a mess is important, but without a way to eventually create structure they break down. After a while they get messy and are hard to understand and navigate. Eventually I sold Mori.īut text files aren’t perfect either. I worked all day in my fancy information manager, and kept all my notes in plain text files on my desktop. This left me in an embarrassing situation. Just me and my ideas without a bunch of user interface widgets in the way. It didn't do as much, but it is clean, simple, and direct. It did everything that I thought I wanted… A place to record, process, and create ideas. My goal was to create the perfect information manager.
Foldingtext how to#
If you know how to type, you already know most of what you need to effectively use FoldingText.įrom 2001 to 2007 I made a program called Mori. Maybe not so much in every feature and implementation, but in the large idea of a text based user interface.FoldingText does some neat things, but in the end you are just typing. That's why I prefer using the outliner data model, but presented as unconstrained plain text editor.īesides the history described above FoldingText was most inspired by the Cannon Cat. they are field based so you only edit one line at a time. But while I like them, they are problematic on how constraining they are when editing. While Muthahhir has taken over the FoldingText project and is working on a big release soon.Īlong the way I've looked to lots of apps for inspiration.Įarly outliners in particular. So I've refocused to work on TaskPaper and WriteRoom again. And I didn't have resources to keep working on all the apps.
Foldingtext software#
Hog Bay Software had to shrink down to only me again.
Foldingtext mac#
And then Mac apps stopped selling so fast and we didn't' have money to continue. Mutahhir and I worked mostly on FoldingText. By this time there were 4 of us working at Hog Bay Software. FoldingText become a good markdown editor, but the Markdown focus clouded the bigger goal for me.ħ. It added a lot of complexity (keeping markdown parsed into runtime outliner model) and made most people think of FoldingText mostly as a markdown editor. Along the way I decided to use Markdown as the plain text format that would define the underlying outline structure. FoldingText was my attempt to generalize the outline mode/plain text UI into a platform that other's could extend. But TaskPaper's underlying outliner model with a text UI seemed like it would be good a many other things. I wanted it to stay "Plain text todo lists". I didn't want to keep bolting features onto TaskPaper. After a few years the end result is that TaskPaper is an outliner data model presented/edited through a plain text editor.Ħ. But over time I wanted a better solution for handling large complex todo lists and so started building in outlining and filtering into the app. The original versions were just a little syntax highliting built into TextEdit. I created TaskPaper as a simple text alternative to OmniFocus. Lots of chrome surrounding a simple list of tasks. At the time 2005/2006 "Getting Things Done" apps were becoming popular, but they were pretty complicated. Many people saw WriteRoom as a MS Word alternative, even though it was much, much, simpler.ĥ. This lead me to the conclusion that there's a market and need for simple text based alternatives to "major" apps. so yeah for that! :) This quickly sold better then my notebook program which had at that point I'd put years of work into.Ĥ. It originated the term "Distraction free writing". that it could zoom into a nice fullscreen mode. WriteRoom was a very basic text editor with one feature. Was a popular feature, but Ulysses was a big app with lots of other features that I didn't really want. Around this time added "full screen mode" to their app. After a few years I was making my living selling this app, but I would still tend to go back to keeping my notes on desktop in TextEdit.ģ.
Foldingtext full#
Database of text files with a full text index for searching. Similar concept to Evernote (but a few years before I think).
I gave up on ZUI for notes and decided instead to build Hog Bay Notebook, a Mac app for notes. Great fun but I always ended up using plain text files on my desktop instead of fancy ZUI app.Ģ.
I liked to take notes and tried/build various ZUI notes apps. For me this was a super cool project to work on. Out of college I got to work on the Jazz ZUI (Zooming User Interface) toolkit and then build it's successor Piccolo.
I see a number of FoldingText history questions. Mutahhir has since taken the project over while I continue to work on TaskPaper and WriteRoom. I am original designer/creator of FoldingText.
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