Tools Roundup - March 16, 2022

by: Scott Nesbitt

Welcome to this edition of an irregular series of roundups that look at plain text tools I’ve found interesting but haven’t explored in depth. Let’s dive in!

Enter

As you probably know, I’m a Linux guy. I don’t use Cupertino’s fruit machines in my personal life. That said, there are some interesting plain text apps for the phones and tablets that the company puts out. One of them is Enter.

It’s described as a lightweight note-taking app. It enables you to quickly take notes and add tags to those notes to organize and filter them. You can also lock notes to make them private, and archive (rather than delete) notes so you can dig them up later.

Bartib

Do you need to track the time that you spend working on tasks? And are you comfortable at the command line? Then you might want to give Bartib a look.

The tool has a small set of simple commands which, among other things, lets you specify the times that you started and stopped a task, continue to track time against one you’ve stopped, and create reports on what you’ve been working on. You can also list all of the project you’re working on, all of the project you’ve worked on in the past, and even edit the text file containing all of your information in your editor of choice.

plann

plann isn’t software. It’s a template (in the form of a text file) that you use to plan and track your activities for a given week. While it doesn’t have any moving parts, plann definitely fits my definition of a simple, useful tool.

All you need to do is download the template (named plann.txt), save it with a different name, and open it in you favourite text editor.

From there, you list how many tasks you prefer and mark them with an “x” once completed. Simple, straightforward productivity. As it should be.