Monday, April 04, 2005

Text Editing Rediscovered

So, what do you suppose I settled on after spending way too much time over several weeks testing various programs for notetaking? (OneNote and Evernote were just the tip of the iceberg; I tried out just about anything remotely relevant that was Open Source, freeware, or had a usable demo. Nothing quite floated my boat.)

Drum roll, please.....

A text editor. It's fast; it can restart with the same windows open; it can easily search in a directory; it can have multiple windows open etc. To my thinking, for this purpose--that is, notetaking rather than programming--Edit Plus works best for me. But I recognize that editors can be a very personal and idiosyncratic choice. In any case, Edit Plus has nots of nice features for this kind of use--like easy access to wordwrap on/off, a nice directory screen, and a fairly unclutered appearance. But, as I say, I'm not going to try to argue anyone into a particular text editor style. It's not free, but at $30 it's cheap enough.

Mind you, I'm not totally happy with this option. For example, a text editor doesn't let me associate other files with my notes by embedding it. Nor does it let me embed graphics. I guess I'll have to fire up a full fledged word processor for those occasions when I need something more. But it's feeling like what I'll use for now in this imperfect software world.

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