Why? I’ve started to realize that over the last several months, I’ve been going in circles in this space. While the circle is a nice, safe, aesthetically-pleasing shape it’s not my favourite shape. I really don't see the point of continually treading the same path, no matter how comfortable doing that is.

Looking back at everything I’ve published here over the years, it’s dawned on me that I’ve said everything I can say about plain text. Everything I've needed to say about plain text. And everything I've wanted to say about plain text. There’s definitely more to write on this subject, but I’m not the one to do it.

The Plain Text Project isn’t going to disappear off the interwebs. I’m going to keep it alive for as long as I can. The domain’s registration is good until the end of May, 2023. On the off chance that I don’t renew the domain, https://scottnesbitt.gitlab.io/ should continue to work.

Thanks for joining me on this journey. It’s been fun, interesting, and a great learning experience for me. I hope it's been that for you, too.

Jump forward a few months to September, 2022. While I did work with Obsidian for close to five weeks when I first gave it a test drive, I had a lingering feeling that I didn’t give Obsidian enough of a chance. And that I didn’t give it enough of a chance to grow on me. So, in late winter/early spring, 2022 (in the southern hemisphere), I decided to give Obsidian another go.

This time, my goal was to use Obsidian exclusively for my work — no dedicated Markdown editor, no dedicated note taking tool, outliner, journal, or task management app. Just Obsidian.

Here’s an account of how my second attempt at using Obsidian went.

Starting with a Plan

The problem with Obsidian, or any tool like it, is that it’s too flexible. You can do, and often try to do, everything with it. Trying to do everything with Obsidian leaves you overwhelmed by the possibilities.

In trying to do everything, you don’t do everything that you need to do. Not by a long shot. Instead, you get pulled into the vortex of test driving plugins, themes, and templates. You look for tips and tricks. You try out workflows that are often not right for your purposes. You twiddle and twern instead of doing the work.

I have to admit that’s kind of what happened to me during my first go ’round with Obsidian. This time, though, I started with a plan. Specifically, focusing on what I needed to do with the application rather than on everything that I could do with Obsidian.

Those tasks were:

• Taking notes.
• Keeping a journal.
• Creating outlines for my writing.
• Writing drafts of blog posts and articles.
• Maintaining my task list.
• Creating my daily plan/schedule.

I didn’t try to use Obsidian for life logging, for planning and tracking workouts, for quantifying myself, for saving recipes or articles or interesting quotes, or for capturing anything and everything. I didn’t think about functions that I never use, about use cases that aren't mine, or about how someone else uses Obsidian.

There are a few people who will say that the way in which I use Obsidian is boring and that I’m not using it to its full potential (whatever that means). That’s their opinion, but I don’t find tools to be an endless source of fascination or as lands of discovery. Nor do I try to tweak or push the tools that I use as far as I can take them. I don’t see any need to do that. I use tools to get things done with the minimum of effort. That’s it.

Getting Started

As I did with my previous attempt at working with Obsidian, I set up a vault (in Obsidian’s parlance, a local folder of plain text Markdown files) in Nextcloud to sync my work and my application settings across my laptops. I also created a folder structure to better organize my work. That structure looked something like this:

I dropped the templates that I use for blogging and writing into one of those folders, and also created templates for tasks, my daily schedule, and my weekly recaps.

With that out of the way, I installed and fired up Obsidian. When prompted, I pointed it to that vault and was ready to go.

I also installed or enabled a handful of plugins that I thought would be useful to me:

• Checklist
• Better Word Count
• Markdown Prettifier
• Obsidian Tabs
• Outline
• Pandoc Plugin
• Tasks

I could have installed more, but the others that looked at (while interesting) weren’t much use to me. Looking back, there were probably a few plugins that I installed which I didn't actually need.

Getting to Work

Once I had Obsidian set up, I removed Apostrophe and Standard Notes from the dock on my desktop. Out of sight, out of mind and all that. I put Obsidian in the dock so it was front and centre.

For the first few days, firing up Obsidian as my go-to app was a bit harder than I expected. It really is difficult to shift habits … I’m not sure that using Obsidian became natural, but automatically turning to Obsidian became easier as time went on.

Working in Obsidian’s editor is just like working in any other Markdown or text editor. I tend to add formatting by hand, so I don’t miss toolbars or anything like that. Having said that, I couldn’t find a way to change the editor’s font — I prefer to work with a monospaced font rather than the default. I did try a plugin that offers more options to change Obsidian’s appearance but it suddenly stopped playing nicely with the application and I had to delete it.

Since I use Write.as to do a lot of my web publishing, my workflow there didn’t change. I copied and pasted my posts from Obsidian into Write.as, in the same way I did when using Apostrophe.

Where things got a bit more convoluted was with articles for the Plain Text Project. I write those articles in Markdown and use a script to convert them to HTML. Getting those articles ready for publication required a couple of extra steps.

With everything else, using Obsidian was a mixed bag. I liked having, for example, my task lists and notes and schedules in one place. But that's something I can do with other applications, like Standard Notes or Joplin. In that way, Obsidian didn't offer any advantage over what I'm currently using.

Summing Up

I ended my second experiment with Obsidian after just a little over eight weeks. I can’t say that Obsidian grew on me, or that I grew into it. I came to the same conclusion this time around as I did with my first experiment with Obsidian. It’s a solid solution for someone who needs a tool like this.

Aside from keeping everything in one place, Obsidian doesn’t offer me much beyond what I normally use to do my work. As I said in my previous look at Obsidian, it’s a solution for someone whose work and thinking has more scope than mine, is deeper than mine, which has more parts (moving and otherwise) than mine.

Obsidian just isn't for me. And I don't think it ever will be.

In my work in this space and elsewhere over the years, I’ve looked at … well, a lot of text editors. And when the fives of people who read what I write don’t see their favourite editor in an article, they suggest I include it.

Besides the usual suspects, one editor that keeps popping up is Geany. While I haven’t written a lot about Geany, I’m not unfamiliar with it. Despite being aimed at developers, Geany was for years the editor I used when working with LaTeX documents.

Since it’s been quite some time since I’ve used it, I recently decided to give Geany another look. Let’s jump in.

Why Geany?

When I mentioned that I was writing this post, a few people asked me why I was looking at a developer’s editor when I advocate using simple text editors. That’s a good question.

In my mind, Geany occupies an interesting middle ground. While it’s flexible enough for a number of development tasks, Geany is also light enough for anyone, regardless of their level of technical skill, to use for with their work in plain text. However simple or involved that work may be.

Getting Geany

If you’re a Linux user, try installing it using your distribution’s package manager. If you want to go all hardcore techie, then you can try grabbing the source code and compiling it yourself.

Geany isn’t only available for Linux. You can get installers for Windows or macOS. There’s even a version of the editor for PortableApps (a platform for running Windows applications off a USB flash drive).

Once you have it installed, fire up Geany.

Using Geany

As you’ve probably guessed, using Geany is like using any other text editor. You create or open a text file and start typing. Nothing too fancy or complicated there. If the file you open uses a markup language, and that language is supported in the editor, Geany applies syntax highlighting to it.

You can create a file based on one or more templates by selecting File > New (with Template). Most of the templates are for writing software, although there are templates for HTML, HTML5, and LaTeX documents, too. You can even add your own templates. I haven’t tried that, if only because I have other templates that I use.

The editor also has a few other useful features, including word count, line wrapping, and a very good search and replace function. Geany doesn’t come with a spelling checker out of the box, but you can add one. More on this in a moment.

Configuring Geany

Like most software these days, you can tweak Geany so that it’s to your liking. To do that, select Edit > Preferences.

You can change the editor’s font, whether or not and what to display on the toolbar, change shortcut keys, and a whole lot more. Beyond setting the font and a couple of other options, I ignore most of the preferences. If you’re interested, you can learn more about Geany’s preferences in the editor’s documentation.

On top of that, you can also change the editor’s colour scheme. You can, for example, add a dark theme or one to give Geany a theme that looks more like the ones used in Gedit or Notepad++.

Plugins

A few paragraphs ago, I mentioned that you can add a spelling checker to Geany. To do that, you need to install a plugin. As you’ve probably guessed, plugins enable you to add to the editor’s functions.

When you install it, Geany comes with six plugins. They do a few basic things, like exporting files, enabling you to split windows, and to insert HTML entities. You can install other plugins. Aside from spelling checker and LaTeX plugins, I have no use for the other plugins. Your mileage may vary.

After you’ve installed plugins, you can enable, disable, or configure them by selecting Tools > Plugin Manager.

Making Geany (Look) a Little Less Techie

Geany looks like this when you first fire it up after installation:

If you aren’t a developer, there’s a lot of clutter there. At first sight, you might even think This really isn’t for me.

If you don’t need a lot of you see (and chances are you don’t), you can get rid of it. To do that, click the View menu and deselect these options:

• Show Line Numbers
• Show Message Window
• Show Sidebar

You can also remove toolbar buttons you don’t use by right clicking on the toolbar and selecting Toolbar Preferences. In the window that displays, click Customize Toolbar.

Select an item from the left column and click the < button to remove it.

After you remove everything you don’t need, Geany has a slightly more streamlined look. This is what the editor looks like for me:

Final Thoughts

Although Geany is billed as a developer’s editor, it’s also a very good general purpose text editor. It’s surprisingly fast for an editor that packs the number of features that it does.

While I like Geany and find it useful, it’s not my editor of choice at the moment. But because I don’t use it doesn’t make Geany a bad editor. Far from it. Geany just doesn’t suit my needs right now. It might in the future, though. And it might meet your needs in a text editor now. The only way to find that out is to give Geany a serious test drive.

Those folks don’t seem to realize that those applications, while a good fit for them, might not be as good a fit for someone else. Especially someone whose needs are simple or someone who doesn’t want or need to scale the learning curve of those applications.

Consider the combination of Emacs and org-mode. More than once, I’ve been accused of hating or fearing both. Far from either. Believe it or not, I actually do like them. Probably more than most techie tools I’ve tried over the years. For a space of about 27 months, I used Emacs and org-mode exclusively to take notes, to outline my writing, to manage my task lists, to keep a journal. And I used Emacs for much longer to do everyday text editing and writing, as well.

I don’t pretend to be an expert Emacs or org-mode user, but I’m definitely not unfamiliar with them. The combination of the two enabled me to do what I needed to do. In the end, though, I found both were just a bit too much for what I need to do. And then there were Emacs’ various quirks, both small and not-so-small. All of that convinced me to embrace something simpler, something better suited to me and to what I do.

As I pointed out in a previous article, not everyone’s needs are same when it comes to tools for working with plain text. Some people require the complexity of Obsidian or of an advanced text editor or of a convoluted toolchain. For others, using a text editor like Gedit or Notepad, bolstered maybe by some other simple application, fits their needs perfectly.

In the future, before you blurt out Why not just use … consider who you're saying that to. Take a moment to think about how their use cases, and their use of plain text in general, might differ from yours. You might discover that there’s a good reason someone opts for tools and applications other than your go-to solution.

WordGrinder

A word processor at the command line? One that’s more than just a glorified text editor? That’s what you get with WordGrinder.

WordGrinder doesn’t pack the features of, say, LibreOffice Writer but that doesn’t make it useless. It’s a great way to hammer out drafts. You can add formatting to text and create headings, craft lists, and even add code samples.

While WordGrinder saves documents in its own format, it can open HTML and plain text files. You can also export your work to Markdown, LaTeX, or troff (an older typesetting system).

textnote

textnote is a command line application for saving what its creator calls daily notes in plain text.

When you run textnote, it uses a simple template that creates a new file containing placeholders for your tasks and for your notes. That file opens in your default text editor.

You fill in the blanks throughout the day and then save the file. You can later open that day’s file to look back your notes or check your task list in preparation of a review.

nb

nb is a bit of a multitool for information in plain text. Not only can you take notes with it, you can also save bookmarks and create task lists. And, like the other applications in this roundup, nb is a command line application. Don’t let that scare you off, though. It’s quite user friendly.

nb also has a number of other features, including the ability to create multiple notebooks, add inline images, tag notes and search them, encrypt your information, and to store your notes as Markdown, Emacs org-mode, or LaTeX files.

There’s a bit more to nb. If you’re a command line junkie, give it a peek.

Then along came Cascading Style Sheets (CSS for short). CSS enables you to add consistent formatting to web pages — everything from changing the sizes of fonts to setting margins to setting colours and the alignment of text. And more. As the years went by, CSS became more complex to fit needs of people who needed more intricate layouts for their sites. To be blunt: CSS got more convoluted and difficult to use, whether you’re a web designer or not.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t a place for simple, clean CSS. Especially for those of us who are publishing small websites and blogs and the like. I looked at eight simple CSS files in a previous article. Let’s look at some more CSS files that get the job done without adding too much weight to a web page or a website.

Simple.css

The goal of this file, created by Kev Quirk, is to make HTML look good, really quickly. And Simple.css lives up to that billing.

Simple.css offers clean, unadorned styling for not just text elements but also for forms, buttons, navigation menus, and tables. A page styled with Simple.css looks good but isn’t visually overwhelming. Plus pages are responsive, so what you see renders nicely on smaller screens.

axist

Weighing in at around 5 KB, axist packs a lot into that relatively small amount of CSS. You get large, easy-to-read text (which is great for those of us whose eyesight is in decline).

Tables, forms, and lists are also nicely formatted. There’s enough padding on either side of the screen so you don’t feel like you’re reading right across the screen (as you would have in, say, 1996). Like Simple.css, pages with axist applied to them are also responsive — I’d say they’re slightly easier to read on a smaller screen.

SPCSS

The SP in SPCSS stands for simple and plain. This stylesheet definitely lives up to that billing.

In a lot of ways, SPCSS reminds me of Simple.css, but stripped back to even more of the basics. It’s not flashy, but it’s not dull either. And it has a dark mode if that’s your sort of thing. While responsive, the text is a bit smaller than Simple.css and axist. You can edit the stylesheet to change that if you like.

Bonus: 100 bytes of CSS

If you don’t need to style every element (or even the main elements) on a web page, you’ll want to check this out. It’s a snippet of CSS that controls the maximum width of a web page, the size of fonts, the spacing between lines, and margins. Just that and nothing else.

You can embed that snippet into a web page or put it in a separate CSS file so you can use it across multiple pages. The person behind this also offers another 100 bytes of CSS that you can use to add margins to elements on a page and to change the text to a sans-serif font.

Final Thought

CSS doesn’t need to be complex. It doesn’t need to be flashy. And you don’t need to become an expert web developer or designer to use it.

Using the CSS files (and one snippet) that this article introduces are a great way to quickly and attractively format a simple web page, a simple website, or a document formatted with HTML.

The problem was that I couldn’t get it to work. So, I duly uninstalled GitJournal and forgot about it. Then, in late 2021, I found mention of GitJournal in some notes. This time ’round, I was able to get it up and running.

Let’s take a look at what I discovered.

GitJournal?

It’s one of I don’t know how many mobile note taking apps out there that support Markdown. But unlike many other apps, GitJournal doesn’t save your notes to some of the obvious places — like various boxes and drives online.

Instead, GitJournal synchronizes your notes with the hosting providers that support git (a tool that developers use to track changes to their code). You could be running your own instance of git somewhere, or you can use popular ones like GitLab or GitHub.

Getting Started

Install the app on your phone or device from either the Google Play Store or the Apple App Store.

I’m not going into detail about connect GitJournal to a git. That process is a bit involved. You will need:

• An instance of git.
• A repository for your notes.
• An SSH key to securely connect GitJournal to that repository.

Working with GitJournal

Here’s what GitJournal looks like when you fire it up:

You can create these types of files with GitJournal:

• Notes
• Journals
• Checklists

You can tap a button at the bottom of the screen to create each type of file.

Note: Tapping the + button the main screen also creates a note.

Here’s what a new note looks like:

A new journal:

And a new list:

Tap in the editing area and start typing. You can add formatting, with Markdown, using the on-screen keyboard or using the formatting toolbar at the bottom of the screen. The formatting toolbar is limited in what it can do (for example, headings and lists), but it’s enough for most needs.

You can preview or delete a file while editing it, as well as add a pointer to an image.

When you’re finished editing a file, tap the checkmark icon in the top left of the screen to save it. Doing that also synchronizes the file with your git repository.

Organizing Your Files

Out of the box, GitJournal saves all files in what it calls the root folder. That’s that top-level folder in your notes repository in git. If you create a lot of files, things get pretty messy pretty quickly.

To better organize your files, you can create folders — for example, one for notes, one for journals, and one for checklists. To do that, tap the stacker menu in the top-left corner of the main window and then tap Folders.

On the Folders screen, tap the + button, type a name for the folder, and then tap Create. You can add a file to a folder while editing it by tapping Root Folder at the bottom of the screen and then tapping the name of the folder into which you want to put the file.

Final Thoughts

Even though it’s tied to a techie tool like git, I don’t class GitJournal as a techie tool. While setting it up is a bit involved, it doesn’t take much technical knowledge to do that. Once it’s set up, GitJournal is as easy to use as any other mobile note taking app.

That said, GitJournal’s not an app for everyone. Mainly because git isn’t part of everyone’s plain text workflow. If git is part of yours, then give GitJournal a peek. It’s a simple and effective mobile note taking tool that could well fit into your overall writing or productivity workflow.

In the latter bucket are emails that propagate what I consider myths surrounding plain text. Let’s take a look at a few of them.

You Need a Text Editor Packed With Every Feature to Use Plain Text Effectively

Usually, an editor like Emacs or Vim or VS Code is mentioned when someone states something like that. An editor that does so much, or can do so much, that people are always finding ways to push those editors to their limits.

I don’t believe that a powerful, feature-packed text editor is essential part of the plain text life. At least, not for everyone. More than a few people can do what they need to do in plain text, comfortably, using a simple text editor. And, anyway, what using plain text effectively means will vary from person to person. One size doesn't fit all.

Unless You’re Using pandoc, You’re Not Using Plain Text Properly

In 2019, I received an email pointedly telling me that 1) the site's list of tools didn’t include pandoc, and 2) the list was worthless without pandoc. I’ve heard that more than a couple of times since then.

And I’m calling you-know-what on that. There are some folks who might find this difficult to fathom, but not everyone needs to convert from plain text to other formats. There are, believe it or not, people who use only unadorned plain text. No markup languages. No conversion to anything required. Why would they need to use pandoc?

You Need More Than One Tool to Get the Most Out of Plain Text

Even before I started The Plain Text Project, I noticed that some people had built complicated toolchains and processes for their work with plain text. Sometimes, I think they’re making things a bit more difficult and a bit more fragile by introducing that much complexity into something that should be straightforward.

Those toolchains and processes might be what they need, but going back to myths above, they’re not essential for everyone. There are people who only need one or two tools to do what they want to do with plain text. That could be text editor and simple note taking tool. It could be plain text todo list manager. It could be an all-in-one application like Obsidian. It could be something more.

You Need to Use Markup Language x

Not necessarily. Some folks don’t want or need to learn, or use, a markup language. Working in vanilla plain text is enough for what they’re trying to do.

And one markup language doesn’t fit all tasks. Some of us only need Markdown, while others need the complexity of AsciiDoc or LaTeX. For some people, HTML is all they need. Others might need to use a couple or three markup languages, depending on what they’re doing at any one time.

Final Thought

As with just about everything, there’s no one way to work with plain text. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

How you work with plain text, and what you use to do it, is based on your needs. It's not based on the needs or methods or ideas of some so-called power user or guru. Or someone, like me, spouting off on their website or blog.

I’ve never been much good at keeping a journal. I’ve tried. Believe me, I’ve tried. It’s just never worked out. Chalk part of that up to laziness and part of that to the belief that little in my life is worth chronicling.

Every so often, though, I take another kick at the journalling can. This time around, I went back to a command line app that I tried and liked a few years ago. That app? jrnl. It’s a quick, easy, and minimalist way to keep a journal. Let’s take a look at it.

Getting Going

To install jrnl, you’ll need Python and a tool called pip installed on your computer. If they aren’t installed, do the deed using your Linux distribution’s package manager.

Open a terminal window and run the command pip install jrnl. It should only take a few seconds to install.

The first time you run, jrnl asks you where to store the file journal.txt (which stores your information). Out of the box, jrnl saves the file to the folder .local/share/jrnl/ in your /home directory.

Next, jrnl asks if you want to password protect the file journal.txt. If you do, enter a password. Don’t forget the password — you must enter it every time you write an entry in your journal.

Writing Journal Entries

You can do that in two ways. The first way is to type something like this at the command line:

jrnl My insightful journal entry

Of course, you’ll replace your text with what I wrote. I mean, what do I know about journalling? Press Enter to save the what you typed.

The other way is to type jrnl at the command line. This opens the file journal.txt in your default text editor. Type your entry, then save it.

Both methods have their advantages. Work straight from the command line enables to add a single-line entry quickly. By using a text editor, you can create an entry with multiple lines.

Adding Times and Dates to Your Journal Entries

When you create an entry, jrnl gives it a time and date — for example 2022-03-05 20:08. You can change that by adding your own timestamp.

To do that, type something like this:

jrnl timestamp: Did stuff

Don’t forget the colon after the timestamp.

The timestamp can be, for example, yesterday, Saturday at 8 am, a date, or a date and time.

If you use a timestamp that specifies a day, jrnl converts that to its date format. For example, entering last Monday adds the date 2022-02-24 to your entry.

Adding Favourites to Journal Entries

Maybe something big happened. Maybe something really good happened. Maybe you want to make sure it stands out in your journal. Do that by adding favourites to an entry. How? By adding an * — for example:

jrnl *Got a pay rise!

Make sure that there’s no space between the asterisk and the text.

Using Tags

If you use jrnl daily (or more than once a day), you’ll wind up with more than a few entries. That can make things interesting when you want to go back over some of them.

While jrnl has a decent search function (more on this in a few paragraphs), you can use tags to categorize your entries. Using tags, you can have journal entries for work, your personal life, to keep an exercise log, or whatever else you need to keep a journal for.

Add tags to a journal entry using the *@* sign, like this:

jrnl Did a non-stop hour of bodyweight @exercise. I'm tired!

Just make sure that the tags mean something to you and that they’re easy to remember.

Viewing Your Journal Entries

So you’ve been using jrnl for a while. And now you want to go back and view some of the entries in your journal. You can do that in several ways.

One way is to tell jrnl to show you the last number of entries by typing:

jrnl -n 8

That will display the last eight entries in your journal. Specify a larger or smaller number as needed.

You can also use dates and date ranges. Let’s say you want to view all the journal entries from January of this year to today. Do that by typing:

jrnl -from january

To view a range of dates, use the -from option with the -until option. Let’s say you want to view your journal entries from March 1 to March 15, 2022. To do that, type:

jrnl -from 2022-03-01 -until 2022-03-15

Viewing Favourite and Tagged Entries

View all of your favourite entries, type:

jrnl -starred

To view tagged entries, type:

jrnl @yourTag

You can include multiple tags if you need to. You can also specify a date or date range to view. You’ll need to add the and option to your search. For example, to view all entries tagged with @cycling from June 1 to June 15, type:

jrnl -from 2022-06-01 -until 2022-06-15 and @cycling

Is That All jrnl Can Do?

No. There’s a lot more this little utility can do. Read the documentation for more details about importing and exporting your journal and about some advanced options.

While I’m not sure that jrnl will get me back on the journalling horse, I’m more comfortable using it than any other journal app on my desktop, on the web, or on a mobile device.

• Transform Your Writing Process with Obsidian
• Using Obsidian For Writing Fiction & Notes
• Writing with Obsidian
• Why Obsidian is so great for writing

Notenik

Built for Macs, Notenik offers you a structured way of creating and maintaining your notes. All in plain text.

Unlike most note taking apps, which are freeform, Notenik’s editor uses fields to break down the elements of a note — for example, its title, the body, any tags or links, and even images associated with the note. That sounds restrictive, but it isn’t once you get used to it.

Notenik saves your notes as plain text, which you can format using Markdown. You can also put your notes into collections, which are folders that contain notes with a similar theme.

weblorg

There are more than a couple of people who use the Emacs text editor and its org-mode package to do … well, quite a few weird, wild, useful, and interesting things. That includes creating and maintaining websites and blogs.

weblorg is a static HTML generator for Emacs and org-mode that does what it says on the tin. It enables you to create and manage the pages for a website by editing files in org-mode’s markup language.

When you’re ready to publish that site (or updates to the site), weblorg generates your site’s structure and the HTML files make it up. There’s a bit of setup involved, but once that’s out of the way it’s more or less push-button publishing from the editor.

micro

I take a bit of heat every so often for not featuring (or even mentioning) text editors that run in a terminal window in this space. There’s a reason for that: I’ve never been able to forge a good relationship with one. That was the case until I ran into micro.

micro is like a desktop text editor that runs at the command line. You can use mouse with micro, but also common desktop keyboard shortcuts. You can also copy and paste between your desktop and the editor, as well as take advantage of some useful plugins.

Read this article at Linux Magazine for a more in-depth look at micro.

by: Scott Nesbitt | 05 July 2022

There’s no single note taking tool to rule them all. Some of us need a tool with all of the bells and whistles. Some need a tool with a smaller number of those frills.

Then there are the folks who only need a basic application. Something bare bones. Text only. No linking, no images, no visualization, no multi-angle shower head. This article is for those people.

Let’s take a quick look at five simple tools for taking notes in plain text.

Nextcloud Notes

If you’re not familiar with Nextcloud, it’s a file syncing and storage application. Thanks to the various components that have been integrated into it, Nextcloud can also be a very effective personal productivity hub. One of those components that make up the hub is Nextcloud Notes.

Notes is a simple tool, which enables you to quickly and easily take plain text notes. You can also format your notes with Markdown and organize them using categories (which are like folders that contain notes on a similar subject). There’s even a mobile app for Android.

You can read more about Nextcloud Notes in this article.

Simplenote

For the longest time, Simplenote was my go-to application for taking notes. Why? It didn’t have any bells or whistles. It gave me a minimalist, blank canvas on which to write notes (and more). I didn’t need to worry about other features I’d never use.

While Simplenote has gotten a few additional features bolted on to it over the years, it's still minimal. It’s still easy to use. On top of that, it supports Markdown and has apps for the Linux, macOS, and Windows desktops along with apps for Android and Apple devices.

Notorious

Notorious is simple, keyboard-driven note take application for the Linux desktop. All you need to do is enter a title for your note, then start typing. You can’t get any simpler than that.

You can format your notes with Markdown, choose to save them with the extension .txt or .md, and you can specify where to save your notes. It’s simple, light, and quite snappy.

Auer Notes

Auer Notes is one of those tools that started life as a way to scratch its creator’s itch. That itch? To create a quick, simple, secure note taking application for macOS.

In a lot of ways, Auer Notes looks like the stock Notes app on the Mac desktop. That’s where the similarity (which is quite superficial) ends. Auer Notes saves your notes as text files, which you can keep on your hard drive or sync using a service like Nextcloud.

Your Favourite Minimal Text Editor

Who says that you need a dedicated note taking app at all? Why not use a text editor? Like the one installed with your computer’s operating system.

Yes, even something as barebones as Windows Notepad. As long as it saves files as plain text and as long as you use a well-thought out folder structure, a simple, minimal text editor can be more than enough for your note taking needs.

These days, we’re not just limited to plain old Courier. There are also other nice monospace fonts out there. Let’s take a quick look at three more of them.

Overpass Mono

Overpass Mono is, as you might have guessed, part of the Overpass font family. I came into contact with it thanks to a few people I know who work at Red Hat (a company that heavily uses Overpass for just about everything).

Overpass Mono is strong and striking. And, to my untrained eye, it looks as if it combines the best elements of both a monospace font and a sans-serif font. The characters have a pleasing shape, which contrasts nicely with their striking appearance.

Source Code Pro

While aimed at coders (hence its name), anyone can use Source Code Pro for any plain text task — from writing in HTML or Markdown, to maintaining a task list, to taking notes, and anything else in between.

Source Code Pro is reminiscent of some other monospace fonts I’ve looked at in the past, like Hack and IBM Plex Mono. That said, Source Code Pro has its own personality. A personality that stands out, but which isn't jarring.

Space Mono

Space Mono is another one of those fonts that really didn’t work for me at first. Don’t ask me why, but there was just something about the font that I just couldn’t put my finger on.

That slowly changed. And while it’s (still) not one of my favourite monospace fonts, I do find Space Mono a rather aesthetically pleasing one. That might be because the font has something of a retro futuristic look (of which I’m a fan).

Final Thought

As with any of the other fonts that I’ve looked at in this space, the three above won’t appeal to everyone. While I don’t use Overpass Mono, Source Code Pro, or Space Mono regularly, that doesn’t mean I don’t like them. Or that they’re not good fonts. Give one or all of them a try. You just might find a new favourite monospace font in the bunch.

You can be excused for thinking that people weren’t productive before the advent of the internet, with all the shiny productivity tools that it seemed to spawn. But that’s not the case.

One of the most productive people I’ve ever met was someone I encountered in the early 1990s. At that time, I was working as a writer at a mutual fund company. He was an older gent (well, older than I was at the time) who happened to be one of the company’s top salespeople.

He didn’t keep track of everything that he had to do using the nascent planning software of the day. Instead, he used a humble day planner. Yes, that busy sales agent got things done with pen and paper.

He kept it simple, pared everything back to the basics. It worked well for him, and you can apapt what he did to plain text.

Let’s take a look at one approach to creating a plain text day planner.

Why Use Plain Text and Not a Calendar?

Admittedly, using a calendar application has its advantages. You can set up reminders and (fairly) easily share items in your calendar if you need to. To be honest, I find it faster and less tedious to add items into a plain text file than entering them into a calendar.

On top of that, if you need to you can share or sync a day planner file with others via your file syncing service or tool of choice.

Before You Begin

This article won’t go into how to structure the folder in which you’ll (at least, in which you should) store your day planner files. Read this article if you need some advice about that.

However, you should decide if you want to use a single file per day, or one file per week (broken into sections for each day). In this article, I’m going to look at using a single file per day.

Creating the Planner

The structure of the file that I’m about to describe is based heavily on that of a traditional paper day planner.

Start by creating a text file and give it a descriptive name. I put the date in the file name, which looks like this: dd-mm-yyyy-day-plan.txt — for example, 08-06-2022-day-plan.txt. Feel free to come up with a better naming convention for your files …

As with other files like this, I like to have some metadata at the top of the file to identify it at a glance when I’m working with it. Not just a date, but also a daily goal. Here’s an example:

---
Date: 08-06-2022

Goal for today: Wrap up updates to the essay collection
---

From there, enter what you have planned for today, broken down by blocks of time. That can be everything from meetings to appointments to break times to what you intend to learn or study. If it’s scheduled for that day, add it to your day planner file. I half-jokingly say that if it's not in my planner, it doesn't exist. At least, it's not going to happen.

Here’s an example:

---
Date: 25-05-2022

Goal for Today: Wrap up draft of proposal and send it out for review
---

08:30 - 09:00 - Call with x to discuss y
09:00 - 10:00 - Demonstrate new workflow tool
10:00 - 10:15 - Break
10:15 - 12:30 - Work on draft of proposal
12:30 - 13:00 - Lunch
13:00 - 14:00 - Finish draft of proposal
14:00 - 15:00 - Weekly project update meeting
.
.
. 

If you need to add more information about an item, include it as a note below the item, preceded by a >. Here’s an example:

10:15 - 12:30 - Work on draft of proposal
> Contact DK for additional information
.
.
.
14:00 - 15:00 - Weekly project update meeting
> Meeting URL: https://meet.jit.si/12345
.
.
.

I’ve created a template (under a CC0 license) that you can use and modify as you’d like.

Note About Creating a Weekly File

A weekly planner file will look a lot like the example above. There will be a block in the file for each day of the week. If you need to, separate the blocks for each day using three dashes (—).

I’ve created a template, which you can modify as you see fit.

Final Thoughts

Working with a plain text day planner can be a good antidote to dealing with an overloaded calendar. You lose automation and reminders, but you’re forced to become more aware and mindful rather than relying completely on technology to keep you on track.

• Static websites
• Plain Text Blogging
• Simple Guide to HTML for Bloggers
• Org-mode and Pandoc as a static site generator

Devices like the Chromebook, the Chromebase, and the Chromebox aren’t, as some people have labelled them, underpowered toy computers. You can do serious work with them. In a lot of ways, devices running Chrome OS are excellent examples of what I call technology for the masses, not the classes.

And, yes, you can work in plain text on those devices using one of the several text editors available for Chrome OS. Let’s take a quick look at three of those editors. And, to push back against another long-held misconception about Chromebooks, you can use all of these editors without a connection to the internet.

Code Pad

Code Pad is billed as a programmer’s editor. But don’t let that put you off. As with an editor like Notepad++, Code Pad is great for basic text editing tasks — and a few tasks that aren’t so basic, as well.

Like every good text editor out there, Code Pad supports syntax highlighting, autocompletion of text, folding, and an assortment of customizations to the look and feel of the editor — including the ability to change fonts and to choose a different theme. The editor is very responsive; I didn’t notice any lag between keyboard and screen.

Code Pad has one annoyance: when you create a file by selecting File > New, the editor creates an empty JavaScript file with its basic structure. If you want to create another type of file — like a Markdown or an HTML file — you neeed to select the file type from the +New dropdown list in the top-right corner of the editor window.

Caret

When I regularly used a Chromebook, Caret was my go-to text editor. While its developer describes it a professional text editing for Chrome and Chrome OS, it does most basic text editing tasks quite nicely.

Caret’s creator based his tool on the popular Sublime Text editor. Don’t expect Caret to match Sublime feature for feature, though. You'll be disappointed. That said, Caret does have a number of useful functions. You can have multiple files open in separate tabs, the editor automatically applies syntax highlighting to files based on their extension, and you can use Sublime Text’s keyboard shortcuts.

One very useful feature of Caret, especially if you prefer to let your fingers do the walking, is its *command palette. By pressing Ctrl+Shift+P, you can quickly access any of the editor’s commands.

As an editor, Caret works swiftly and smoothly. It packs a lot into a small package.

Text

This is the editor that’s built into Chrome OS. It’s a lot like Notepad under Windows. Text is spare, with few features and functions. But it’s far from useless (as I’ve heard a couple or three people describe it).

To use it, you fire up Text and start typing. Or you can open a text file that you’ve saved to your Chromebook. The options are pretty rudimentary. You can change the size of fonts and tabs, convert tabs to spaces automatically, wrap lines, and the like. Nothing that a so-called power user would be interested in, but Text is great for simple, day-to-day text editing tasks.

Bonus Editor: Emacs

Believe it or not, you can turn on a Linux development environment in newer versions of Chrome OS. Which, as you’ve probably guessed, enables you to install and run various Linux applications.

One of those applications is the Emacs text editor. While you might be able to install and run other Linux text editors, Emacs is the only one that I tried. It works quite well, too. And, yes, you can install org-mode along side it …

I didn’t stress test Emacs on the Chromebook I was using while writing this article, but for what I was doing it worked fairly smoothly and seamlessly.

Final Thoughts

If you’re a Chromebook user, it is possible to comfortably live the plain text life on your device. You might not get all the features you find in the top-tier text editors on the Linux, macOS, or Windows desktops but chances are you won’t miss those features.

In one post, Anna Havron (the person behind that site) discusses keeping a canonical home address book using pen and a notebook. That got me thinking about doing the something similar, but with plain text.

Why would I opt for plain text rather than going analog? As much as I enjoy using a notebook and a pen, my handwriting it bad. Really bad. So bad that I can barely read it sometimes. Also, plain text gives me a bit more flexibility Regardless, both approaches have their merits and their drawbacks. But since the name of this site is The Plain Text Project, I’m going to stay in my wheelhouse.

Why Do This?

When you can, for example, export your email address book in plain text formats like vcard?

You might not want to save every contact you have, just the most important ones. Friends, family, colleagues you want to keep in touch with. And while you can open and view a vcard file in a text editor, the information isn’t exactly easy to read or scan, as you can gather from the sample below:

BEGIN:VCARD
VERSION:4.0
N:Nakayama;Haruko;;
FN;PREF=1:Haruko Nakayama
ITEM1.EMAIL;TYPE=HOME;PREF=1:nakayamah@somedomain.co.jp
ITEM2.EMAIL;TYPE=x-OTHER;PREF=2:haruko@myemail.com
UID:53550e54-23d2-9701-6c84-d3be91419450
END:VCARD

Creating a plain text contact list ensures that humans can easily read the contents of the file, without all the vcard cruft. And that the list is easy to share or print out when or if necessary.

Getting Going

Before you create the list, think about the information that you want include in it. At very least, that information should be each entry’s:

• Name.
• Address.
• Email address(es).
• Phone number(s).
• Any other additional information that you think might be useful, like the person’s birthday.

Here’s an example of the basic structure of that information:

Name: [person's name]
Address:
   - Street address
   - Apartment/unit number (if applicable)
   - Town/City, State/Province/Prefecture, Postal/Zip Code
   - Country
Email:
   - personal:
   - secondary:
   - work:
Phone:
   - mobile:
   - home:
   - work: 
Additional Information:
   - birthday: 
   - spouse's/partner's name: 
   - anything else: 

And here’s an example of an entry containing (admittedly fake) contact information:

Name: Lily Munster
Address:
   - 1313 Mockingbird Lane
   - Unit 631
   - Sometown, NSW 12345
   - Australia
Email:
   - personal: lily@myEmail.com
   - work: lmunster@herOffice.com.au
     > prefers using personal email address
Phone:
   - mobile: +61 02-123-4567
   - home: +61 02-890-1234
     > Call home first
Additional Information:
   - birthday: 01/01/1989
   - Don't talk about pineapple on pizza!

In the example above, you might notice that I added notes below two of the indented items, denoted by a >. That’s not necessary, but it can be useful to (as I did in the example above) to specify a person’s preferred method of contact.

This is a format that works for me. If it doesn’t work for you, feel free to chop and change it to your liking. I’ve created a template (under a CC0 license) with which you can do just that.

One File or Multiple Files?

That’s a question that crops up a lot in these parts, isn’t it?

Having a single file means you don’t need to jump around to find what you’re looking for. And it’s easier to keep track of the file. Using multiple files, on the other hand enables you to focus on one group of people per file, and can make your contact lists easier to scan.

If you decide to use one file, break it down into sections based on the type of contact — for example, Family, Friends, Colleagues. Start the heading for each section with a hashtag, and separate the sections using three dashes (---). Here’s an example:

# Family

[add entries here]

---
## Friends

[add entries here]

---
## Colleagues

[add entries here]

I’ve created a second template, based on the example above (but with the actual structure), that you can use or modify as you need.

Whether use single or multiple files, name them in a way that makes sense to you. And if using multiple, think about how you plan to store those file and put them in a folder with a sensible name.

Final Thoughts

Keeping a plain text contact list is a simple way to create a backup of information about your important connections. This type of file is definitely not a replacement for what you maintain in your email account, but it is something that you can refer to when offline or to ensure that you’re keeping up with the people you want and need to keep up with.

Writing blog posts took something of a back seat to dealing with themes, plugins, SEO, and various other arcana. The so-called pro blogging boom of the last decade and a half, fueled in large part by WordPress, resulted in hulking blogs laden with graphics and multimedia and ads and pop-ups and alla that stuff.

That approach is overkill for the blogger who’s not trying to take the web by storm. It’s overkill for the blogger who only wants to share thoughts and ideas with a smaller audience.

Instead of adding to the ever-increasing bulk of the web, why not take a lean, minimal approach instead? By that I mean blogging without weighing down a reader’s browser or popping up ads or reminders or anything else annoying. Blogging in a bare bones way, in which what you’re writing matters more than how your blog looks.

You can do that quickly and easily with Bear. Like Mataroa (which I looked at in 2021), Bear is a blogging platform that’s spare, that’s minimal. Which is definitely not a bad thing.

With Bear, you get up and running quickly. You focus on words and ideas. You’re publishing as if using, to quote Leo Babauta, a marker and a publicly-posted piece of cardboard. Bear gets rid of the frills and adornments. It enables you to write and publish with little or no friction.

Does that sound interesting? If it does, keep reading to learn more.

Getting Started

Bear is hosted software, so you need to sign up for an account. That account is free, but you can get a paid one ($5 a month or $50 a year). With paid account, you get features like newsletter subscriptions and the satisfaction of helping Bear’s creator keep the lights on.

To sign up, all you need to do is enter an email address or a password and you’re ready to get going.

Setting Up Your Blog

Once you’ve signed up, you’re taken to the Dashboard page. It’s on this page where you add basic information about your blog:

• The blog’s title — for example, 500 Words.
• Its subdomain — for example, 500Words which becomes the URL https://500Words.bearblog.dev.
• Text that appears on the blog’s landing page (more on this in a moment).
• A short description of your blog.

Here’s an example:

How Bear Structures Your Site

When your site gets published, Bear creates a landing page. That page will contain links to your blog posts and whatever other pages you create. Here’s an example:

Bear adds these pages to your site automatically:

• Home.
• Blog.
• About.

I’ll talk about adding more pages in a moment.

Writing Your First Post

To do that, click on Posts and then click New post to jump to the blog editor.

Bear’s editor isn’t going to win any design awards. It’s not ugly, just kind of old school — a set of fields rather than a more modern, minimal looking blank editing canvas as you’d find in, say, Write.as.

To get started, give the post a Title. Then, type the body of your post. You can add formatting to that post using Markdown.

Here’s an example of post that’s in progress:

When you’re done, click Publish (at the bottom of the editor page). Or, you can click Save as draft to continue working on the post later.

Here’s what a published post looks like:

Other Information You Can Add to a Blog Post

What I outlined above is the bare minimum required for a blog post. You can also add this information about the post:

• A permalink.
• A canonical URL.
• A date in the future on which to publish the post.
• A short description that search engines pick up when they spider your blog.
• An image that goes with the description.
• Tags, which you can use to group your posts.

Adding Pages

Earlier in this article, I mentioned that Bear creates links to three pages on your blog automatically. But you can add other pages to your blog, too.

To do that, create a post. Add a title and some content, then click Is page (at the bottom of the editor). When you click Publish, Bear creates the page and adds it to your blog’s navigation bar.

Other Useful Features

Bear also has a few other features that you might find useful. As I mentioned earlier, Bear supports Markdown — including images and tables. Images need to be hosted somewhere else on the web — you need to point to any images you want to use via Markdown’s image syntax:

![Text to describe the image](https://some.where/MyNiftyImage.png)

Bear also automatically generates an RSS feed for your blog. You can choose to exclude posts from your feed (and from Bear’s blog discovery page) by deselecting the Show in feed option in the post editor.

Out of the box, a blog published with Bear is plain but serviceable. You can change the look of your blog by clicking Styling and then either:

• Pasting some CSS that you’ve crafted into that Custom styles box, or
• Pointing to an existing CSS file somewhere on the web in the External stylesheet field.

Here’s an example of a blog styled with the Tufte CSS stylesheet:

Final Thoughts

Like Mataroa, Bear brings minimalism back to blogging. It packs no frills, and yet you can use Bear for serious blogging. Or just occasional blogging. It’s up to you.

With Bear, you can quickly set up your blog and get publishing without worrying about ephemera like themes or plugins. You write. You publish. That’s it.

Before version 2 of the tool, you needed the TeX typesetting system (and the LaTeX extensions) installed on your computer to go directly to PDF. TeX is great, but it’s also quite big. And if you’re only producing the occasional PDF, then it’s overkill to have even a basic TeX system installed on your computer.

With version 2 of pandoc came a new option: –pdf-engine. That option lets you specify which tool to use when doing a conversion to PDF. While you can still use LaTeX (and a few other tools) to do the deed, you don’t need to bother with all that bulk.

Let’s take a look at how to create a PDF from a Markdown file using pandoc and a couple of lighter-weight utilities.

Getting Started

You’ll need pandoc installed on your computer, along with one of these tools:

• WeasyPrint
• wkhtmltopdf

For our purposes, WeasyPrint and wkhtmltopdf are essentially the same, but there are a couple or three little differences. I’ll touch on one of those differences in a moment.

Doing the Conversion

As I mentioned a few paragraphs ago, I’m going to look at how to create a PDF from a file formatted with Markdown. To do that, open a terminal window on your computer. Navigate to the folder containing the file that you want to convert to PDF and then type either:

pandoc [file-name].md --pdf-engine=weasyprint -o [file-name].pdf

or

pandoc [file-name].md --pdf-engine=wkhtmltopdf -o [file-name].pdf

Where [file-name].md is the name of the Markdown file that you want to convert.

Note: Some people add the -t html option to those commands to create an HTML file that WeasyPrint and wkhtmltopdf then convert to PDF. The command also works without that option.

Here’s the result of a conversion using wkhtmltopdf:

What you get looks pretty much the same when you use WeasyPrint to do the conversion. The result is functional, but it’s not the nice PDF file that I promised you in the title of this article. So let’s look at how to add a bit of visual flair to a PDF generated with pandoc.

Enter Print CSS

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS for short) is a way to change the look and feel of a web page or website. Print CSS extends that to formatting a web page or website to be printed. It adds support for changing page sizes, adding page breaks, hiding elements that shouldn’t be printed, adding a cover page, and more.

I’m not going to into print CSS in any detail here, because it’s a big topic that my little brain has trouble wrapping itself around. However, I’m not going to leave you hanging. Here are some sources of information that can help you get started with print CSS:

• Introduction to PrintCSS and CSS Paged Media
• How to Create Printer-friendly Pages with CSS
• CSS: The Perfect Print Stylesheet

Using Print CSS in a Conversion

Let’s say you’ve crafted your own print CSS file or begged/borrowed one from somewhere. To use it, you’ll need to add the –css= option to the string of options that you use with pandoc.

So, once again, open a terminal window on your computer. Navigate to the folder containing the file that you want to convert to PDF and then type either:

pandoc [file-name].md --pdf-engine=weasyprint --css=pdf-styles.css -o [file-name].pdf

or

pandoc [file-name].md --pdf-engine=wkhtmltopdf --css=pdf-styles.css -V papersize:a5 -o [file-name].pdf

Change pdf-styles.css to the name of your print CSS file. Here’s an example the output, via WeasyPrint, from a print CSS file that I use:

My stylesheet, while fairly basic:

• Sets the size of the page to A5.
• Adds page breaks before every Heading 1.
• Creates margins of 1 inch (2.5 cm) all around.
• Uses the Overpass font for all text.

The first point in the list above is one area in which WeasyPrint and wkhtmltopdf differ. wkhtmltopdf ignores page sizes that you specify in the CSS file. Instead, you need to specify the page size in the conversion command using the option -V papersize:a5.

The examples I’ve included in this article are fairly basic. But, I hope, they’ll help spark a few ideas for converting your documents formatted with Markdown (or another markup language) to PDF using pandoc.

• Why and How I Write Scientific Documents in Plain Text
• Scientific Writing with Markdown
• Writing an academic paper in plain text and sharing everywhere
• Markdown for Science and Academia – Why?

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.

But at several of the Day Job^TMs I’ve held over the decades, I’ve had to use Windows on company-issued computers. In that situation, I try to use as much open source software as I can, even on closed platforms. That includes my text editor of choice on Windows. Which, for as long as I can remember, has been Notepad++. It’s a powerful, flexible open source editor, that’s kind of like Windows Notepad on all sorts of digital performance enhancers.

While billed as a source code editor, even non techies will find Notepad++ useful. I do, mainly using it to take notes, to write drafts, to maintain my weekly timesheet, to plan my work, and as a scratchpad.

Let’s take a quick look at working with Notepad++.

Note: In the next several hundred words, I won’t be looking at all of the features of the editor or its features for coders. This article looks at Notepad++ from the perspective of how someone like me might use it.

Getting Going

You can either download an installer from the Notepad++ website or get an unofficial fork of the editor from the Microsoft Store within Windows. If use Linux and want to give the editor a try, you can install a version from the Snap store.

On Windows, installation is point and click. When it’s done, the installation process adds an icon to the Start menu and (optionally) to your desktop.

Getting to Work

Fire up the editor. Looks kind of familiar, doesn’t it?

Notepad++ is like a lot of editors out there, regardless of the operating system on which they run. You get a blank canvas on which to work, and you can have multiple text files open in their own tabs.

As with any text editor, you can either open an existing file or create one. From there, you start typing.

When you save the file, Notepad++ applies syntax highlighting to it based on the extension you give the file. Here’s an example of an HTML file, with syntax highlighting applied:

You can change the highlighting by selecting one of the many options from the Language menu.

Using the Editor’s Built-In Functions

There are a lot of those, as can see from the toolbar:

There are also quite a few more under the editor’s menus. To be honest, I don’t use even a quarter of those functions. The ones I do use include:

• Edit > Convert Case to, which changes the case of text you highlight — for example, to all caps, mixed case, or title case.
• Edit > Line Operations, which does things like splitting and joining lines, removing empty lines, and sorting lines.
• Search and replace, which does what it says on the tin (and does it quite well, too).
• Run, which enables you to (among other things) open an HTML file in your web browser of choice.

There are also a couple of other options enabled by plugins that I use regularly, which I’ll discuss in a moment.

Making the Editor Your Own

While you can’t customize Notepad++ to the degree you can, say, with Emacs or Atom, you can make the editor your own. Let’s look at a few ways in which to do that.

Changing Preferences

You find these under Settings > Preferences. And there are more than a couple of options there.

Some of those options include:

• Whether or not to display the toolbar, and how large the icons on the toolbar are.
• The type of line endings and the default programming or markup language of new files.
• What types of files open in the editor when you double click them in your file manager or on the desktop.
• The behaviour of syntax highlighting.
• How auto completion behaves when you’re typing (or if it’s even enabled).

You can also change your keyboard shortcuts — for example, to make Notepad++ behave like Emacs or Vim — by selecting Settings > Shortcut Mapper.

Using Plugins

Like many editors, Notepad++ supports plugins that expand its capabilities. Many of them are aimed at software developers, so I ignore them. Two that I find indispensable are:

• DSpellCheck, which helps pinpoint spelling mistakes.
• MarkdownViewerPlusPlus, which lets me preview files formatted with Markdown in a pane in the editor.

Here’s an example of the latter in action:

Adding Syntax Highlighting

Out of the box, Notepad++ can apply syntax highlighting to … well, I don’t know how many programming and markup languages. But if there’s a language. But if a language that you’re working in isn’t supported, you can add it.

One way to do that is to create your own language settings by selecting Language > Define your own language. There’s documentation around how to do that if you want to embrace your inner geek a bit.

The other way to add syntax highlighting for a language is to download a language file and import it.

Using the Style Configurator

What happens if you don’t quite like the way syntax highlighting for a particular language works? Select Settings > Style Configurator and make some changes.

You can change the highlighting colours of certain elements, the font used for those elements, and the file extensions that Notepad++ associates with the language.

Final Thoughts

As I mentioned at the top of this article, I only use Notepad++ on computers supplied by my employers. Find it’s a great alternative to Windows’ stock Notepad editor, even if I don’t use all of its features. The ones I use, though, make working with plain text much, much easier.

• The Simplest Markdown Resume Workflow
• Markup, Markdown: Write In Elegant Plain Text
• Make Plain Text Pretty with Markdown
• How to Write Your Next Letter Using Markdown

There are a myriad of note taking tools out there. And those tools cater to a variety of needs and to a variety of user bases. It isn’t a stretch to say that there’s a note taking application for just about everyone.

If you use Nextcloud, you have a more-than-serviceable option in the form of (wait for it!) Notes. It’s worth a look if your note taking needs are simple and you want to work in plain text.

Let’s take that look, shall we?

Working with Notes

Before you start, you’ll need an instance of Nextcloud. You can either host your own instance or get account with a provider.

Notes should be enabled out of the box. If it isn’t, click the account icon in the top-right corner and then click +Apps. Find Notes in the list and click Enable. The Notes icon appears on the toolbar.

Click the Notes icon and then click New note. The editing space displays.

The editor is simple and bare bones. But more than enough for most tasks.

To get to work, start typing. The first line of the note becomes its title in the sidebar. You can use Markdown to format your notes.

Nextcloud saves your notes as you type to the folder Notes. You can change that folder. More on this in a moment.

Organizing Your Notes

If you take a lot of notes, you’ll quickly wind up with a long list of notes in the sidebar. You can group your notes into categories to make them easier to manage.

To add a note to a category, click the ellipsis (…) in the top-right corner of the editing space and then click Details.

Click in the Category field and select the category to use.

If a suitable category doesn’t exist, then type the name of a new one in the field and press Enter.

Other Features

Earlier, I mentioned that Nextcloud Notes is simple and fairly bare bones. That doesn’t mean it lacks features. Here are a few that you might be find useful.

Previewing Notes

If you format your notes with Markdown, you can view how they’ll look when converted to HTML (or another format).

To do that, click the ellipsis in the top-right corner of the editing space and then click Preview.

You can go back to editing the note by clicking the ellipsis and then clicking Edit.

Creating a Task List or a Checklist

You can also use to Nextcloud Notes as a plain text task list or checklist. Do that by creating a new note. Then, type this:

 * [ ]

That immediately turns into a checkbox. Type a description of the task or the checklist item and then press Enter. Doing that adds a new item to the list.

Changing the Settings

There are only two that you can change:

• The default extension of a file (this is .md), and
• The folder in which Nextcloud saves your notes (the default is Notes).

To change those options, click Settings in the sidebar.

Going Mobile

You’re not stuck with working with Nextcloud Notes on your computer. If you’re using an Android-powered device, you can install the Nextcloud Notes app.

The mobile app Nextcloud Notes to your device. You can create and edit notes, add categories (and add notes to them), create task lists and checklists, preview your notes, and even use the mobile app with multiple Nextcloud accounts.

There’s also a widget that you can use to display notes on a home screen. Or you can pin a shortcut to a specific note on a home screen to get quick access to it.

Final Thoughts

Nextcloud Notes is a good choice if you need a way to quickly take notes and sync them between your devices. That Nextcloud Notes saves your notes as individual files, which you can work with using any text editor, is a bonus. As is its support for Markdown.

If that wasn’t enough, the Notes app is another way to enhance Nextcloud as your own productivity hub.

Over the past 18 months or so, several readers of The Plain Text Project (as well as more than a couple of friends and folks I know) have been pointing me towards a certain piece of software. That software? Obsidian.

In addition to getting my ears (virtual and physical) filled with tales of Obsidian and what it can do for me, I read more than a bit about. By September, 2021 I was intrigued enough by Obsidian to cave into peer pressure.

I installed Obsidian on a laptop and spent about a month or so working with it. Not exclusively, mind you, but regularly and instead of certain other tools. Which leads us to the article that you’re reading now.

Here are a few of my thoughts about working with Obsidian.

Obsidian?

Obsidian is a piece of software that bills itself as a a powerful knowledge base on top of a local folder of plain text Markdown files. It’s essentially a turbo-charged note taking tool.

The folder mentioned in the previous paragraph is called a vault. Each file in the vault is a note, which can be just that or an outline or a task list or … well, just about anything you want or need the file to be

You can have multiple vaults — one for each project you’re working on or for specific purposes — for example, research for a paper or a vault containing personal files.

You can also add more featured to Obsidian using plugins. There are several pre-installed, including ones to import files formatted with Markdown and for creating outlines. There are also hundreds of plugins that were created by Obsidian’s community of users. You can use those plugins to, for example, modify Obsidian’s appearance, export your notes to various formats using pandoc, generate a travel itinerary, add a Pomodoro time to Obsidian, and more.

Obsidian’s superpower, though, is its ability to link between notes. That enables you to quickly jump between them as needed. Obsidian can also generate a visual map of the links between notes.

My Thoughts

As I mentioned at the top of this article, I used Obsidian for a month. I’m no expert with it, but I got a good feel for Obsidian and what it can do.

Obsidian is a solid tool, and I can see its usefulness. It’s not for me, though. Why? It’s ideal for bigger projects, for thinking in a grander way than I do or ever will. Obsidian can be useful for, say:

• Preparing a masters or Ph.D. thesis.
• Organizing research for an investigative report.
• Writing a long book.

And more. That said, Obsidian doesn’t work in the way in which I work. My own projects are smaller in scope, with fewer connections and fewer moving parts. I tend to think in a more granular fashion. I look at and think about smaller pictures, not larger ones. I don’t stitch those smaller pictures into a larger, overarching one. When I try to use Obsidian, I feel like I’m trying to shoehorn the way in which I think and work into Obsidian’s framework. That's not a comfortable or efficient way to operate.

When I shared these thoughts with a few other people, they tried to convince me that I needed to delve deeper. They tried to convince me that Obsidian is a fresh, innovative tool. I’m not so sure about that. In many ways, I see Obsidian (and applications like it) as just the next step in the evolution of the wiki. A wiki with a few additional bits snapped on, but a wiki nonetheless.

Trying to Be Everything

Obsidian is one of those applications that people can use for everything. And, as I discovered, more than a handful do just that. In that way, it reminds me of Evernote or Emacs org-mode, and the ways in which many people use them.

You can use Obsidian to take notes, keep a journal, log your life, maintain task lists, organize your research, write, cultivate and publish a digital garden and much, much more. I can’t even begin to scratch the surface of what Obsidian can do and what people use it for.

For me, for what I do, Obsidian is just a bit too much. I find that whatever I can do with Obsidian I can do comfortably using my favourite text editor, a set of text files, and a well-planned folder structure. Taking that route keeps everything fairly lean and simple, which is how I like it.

That’s not to say Obsidian is bad. Or useless. It’s far from either. I can see how some folks would find Obsidian to be a boon.

One advantage I see to Obsidian is that you can have everything in one place. And using the right plugins, you can turn Obsidian into a work hub — you don’t need to jump between applications.

Final Thoughts

As I mentioned a few paragraphs ago, Obsidian just doesn’t fit into my way of working. For me, Obsidian offers little or no advantage over using plain text files and a simple text editor.

Features like Obsidian's map view and its abundance of plugins are interesting, but they really only get in my way. And since I don’t often link, or need to link, directly or explicitly between notes that isn’t a selling point for me.

I don’t have enough incentive to spend time adapting the way in which I work to Obsidian. I gave it a close look, but it didn’t work out.

Even though Obsidian isn’t for me, it might be for you. Here are some links to help you learn more about the software:

• A Guide to Obsidian: Local, Markdown-Powered Networked Notes
• Your Beginner’s Guide to Obsidian
• A Beginner’s Guide to Obsidian, the note-taking app that wants to be your Second Brain
• Publish your Obsidian Vault to your Digital Garden

Code

Code is the text editor that comes with a Linux distribution called elementary OS. It lies somewhere between a bare bones text editor and one packed with a pile of features. While Code probably isn’t going to appeal to the techies, it’s more than up to most everyday text editing tasks.

While Code doesn’t pack much in the way of features, what features it does have are better than pretty good. That includes syntax highlighting, an HTML previewer, along with a solid search and replace function. Code also comes with a set of extensions like a spelling checker, word completion, and bracket completion (useful if you’re working with a markup language).

ts

A while back, I looked at how to create a plain text timesheet. What I described in that article was pretty basic. If you’re looking for more, then you’ll want to check out ts.

ts is a text-based timesheet parser. You create your timesheet entries in a text files, using some simple formatting. Then, you run that file through ts to create your timesheet which includes the total number of hours that you worked. You can also generate a PDF that doesn’t look too bad.

Auer Notes

I can’t tell you how many note taking tools there are for macOS. Mainly because I don’t use the fruit company’s wares. Every so often, though, one of those note taking tools catches my interest. Recently, that was Auer Notes.

Auer Notes is reminiscent of note taking app built into macOS Notes or something like Notes, which I looked at in a previous roundup. Auer Notes saves your notes as individual text files, which are saved to your hard drive. The app’s interface is sparse and clean, making it easy to learn and to use.

Tomboy Notes NG

Once upon a time (and that time was quite a few years ago), one of my favourite tools on the Ubuntu desktop was a note taking tool called Tomboy. Mainly because it combined the best aspects of a note taking tool with a wiki. For a variety of reasons, Tomboy fell off my radar. But it’s being revived (in a way) by the tomboy-ng project.

Like it’s predecessor, tomboy-ng enables you to quickly create and link between notes and easily add formatting to the text of a note. You can also sync files between computers and create snapshots of your notes in case you need to go back to a previous version.

Once upon a time, I used a Linux distribution called Ubuntu quite extensively. One of my favourite apps for Ubuntu was a Markdown editor called UberWriter.

What made UberWriter a favourite tool was its minimalist design. The editor's interface was clean, with no distractions. It was easy to use. And UberWriter had several nice features that complemented its aesthetics.

Then, one day, UberWriter became practically unusable on my desktop — and not just for me, either. I uninstalled it, opting instead for a text editor. For several years, I never looked back.

That changed in early 2021 when a friend pointed me in the direction of a Markdown editor called Apostrophe. After doing a bit of poking around, I learned that the editor is UberWriter in a new guise. Based on my past affinity for UberWriter, I immediately decided to give Apostrophe a go. Here's what happened.

Getting Apostrophe

Since Apostrophe is a Linux application, you can check your distribution's package manager for it — You might be able to install the editor that way. If you can't, you can download the source code and compile it.

Compiling code isn't an option for everyone, though. An easier way to install Apostrophe is to use Flatpak. Do that by running this command in a terminal window:

flatpak install flathub org.gnome.gitlab.somas.Apostrophe

You will, of course, need to install Flatpak on your computer first.

Getting to Work

You've got Apostrophe installed. Now, start it up. As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, it's a minimalist editor.

You can either open an existing file (move your mouse to the top of the window to display the header bar, which contains the Open button) or just start typing.

Nothing really new or revolutionary there. It's just simple text editing which highlights Markdown formatting.

There's no formatting toolbar. You either need to know Markdown (my book is a great reference, by the way!) or you can use keyboard shortcuts to insert frequently-used formatting.

Other Features

As I mentioned a couple of times already, Apostrophe is a fairly minimalist application. It does have some useful features, though. One of which is common to many a Markdown editor: a preview mode. Click the Preview button on the header.

That switches to a view of your document as it would appear as a web page or a word processor document.

Unfortunately, you can't change the look of the preview.

Apostrophe's search and replace function isn't too shabby, either. You can do case sensitive searches and use regular expressions to find words or phrases in a document.

Other than that, Apostrophe checks your spelling as you type and displays a running word count in the bottom right corner of the window. You can turn that automatic spell checking in the application's preferences. And if you click the word count, you also get a breakdown of the number of characters, sentences, and paragraphs in what you're writing as well as an estimated reading time.

Exporting Your Documents

Markdown's great, but it's often not the final form for which something you're working on. When you need your document to take a different shape, you need to convert it.

One of UberWriter's strongest features was its ability to export Markdown documents to several other formats. Apostrophe has, not surprisingly, carried over that feature.

To export a file, click the Save button in the header and choose one of PDF, HTML, or ODT. That does a quick and dirty conversion to those formats. You'll need a TeX system installed on your computer to generate a PDF.

The default output is serviceable, though not fancy as you can see from this PDF:

I hinted more output options, didn't I? Well, that's where the Advanced Export option under the Save menu comes in. You can use that to export your documents to these formats:

• PDF
• LibreOffice Writer
• Microsoft Word
• EPUB
• HTML5 slide shows (using either Reveal.js or DZSlides)
• LaTeX Beamer (another slide format)
• LaTeX
• HTML

All those formats have several options, like including a table of contents, numbering sections, and changing the page size.

A Small Annoyance

Because I've been staring at screens (often smaller ones) since the late 1980s, my eyesight has weakened. A little over nine years ago, I had to start wearing glasses while working at a computer. That also meant finding a suitable font, and increasing the size of the font, in the text editors that I use.

I can't do that with Apostrophe. And I tried to find a way to do the deed. It seems to be a known issue with the application. At the moment, not being able to change the font isn't a deal breaker for me, but I know a few people for whom it is. That said, I'd prefer to be able to use 16 point IBM Plex Mono or Hack with Apostrophe.

Final Thoughts

It's great to see that Apostrophe has taken up the mantle of UberWriter. The latter was an application that I enjoyed using and missed having on my Linux desktop.

I know that Apostrophe won't appeal to everyone — it lacks a lot of bells and whistles that some people expect a Markdown editor (or any editor, whether or not it supports Markdown) to have. Apostrophe is, though, worth a look if you're a Linux user who's looking for a minimalist Markdown editor with some useful features. An editor that lets you focus on your writing, rather than focusing on all the bells and whistles.

• Markdown vs reStructuredText for teaching materials
• Learn LaTeX in 30 minutes
• What is XML?
• We need a new document markup language — here is why

I know I do.

Digital note taking has a lot going for it. It’s:

• Convenient — you can create and access your notes anywhere, using a computer or a mobile device.
• Easy — since you can already use a keyboard and a mouse, you don’t need any new skills to do it.
• Flexible — you can include more than text in your notes.
• Paperless — you don’t have to worry about, for example, losing a notebook or spilling coffee on your notes.

And while digital note taking is a lot like doing the deed the analog way, there are a few pieces of advice that I like the share with people who are moving their note taking to the digital realm.

Pick Your Tool

And stick with it. Learn that tool’s ins and outs, and how to use it efficiently on your desktop and on your mobile device.

What tool you use is up to you. My choice is Standard Notes. But I know that Standard Notes isn’t everyone’s cup of tea (or whatever hot beverage they prefer). Some of the other digital note taking tools I recommend are:

• Simplenote
• Joplin
• Nextcloud Notes

Why even use a service or an app? You can take notes using only a text editor and a set of plain text files.

Keep Your Notes Short

Or, as short as you can. One reason for that is many, many people use tablets or smartphones to take notes. But most of them can’t type as quickly on a tablet or on a phone keyboard as they can on a full-sized physical one. So, you should try to keep your notes concise.

As well, you’ll often use your notes as prompts. They’ll help remind you of details, of something that someone said, or of something you read. Then, you can fill in the blanks.

Write in point form or sentence fragments. A lot of the time, you don’t need to capture everything when taking notes — just the main idea or certain important bits of information.

That said, you have a bit more leeway when if comes to collecting quotes or passages. Instead of typing them out, you can easily copy and paste them into your tool. That saves a lot of time.

However, if you do that remember this important point:

Attribution, Attribution

Always make a record of:

• The name of the person or people who said or wrote what you’re quoting.
• Where you found that information. Include the URL, the name of the publication or blog, the title of the article/post/book containing the information you’re quoting.
• The date on which it was published.

That takes a little extra effort, but it can save you the pain of later having to track down that information later. And recording that information can ensure you don’t get stung by accusations of plagiarism or even libel.

Keep Your Notes in Plain Text

Avoid, where possible, using markup to format your notes. At least when you’re taking those notes. If you’re trying to get things down quickly, using a markup language (even a lightweight one) just slows you down.

Later, if you need to add formatting, then I suggest doing that with Markdown.

Make Sure You Can Get to Your Notes

By that I mean no matter where you are, and no matter what kind of computer or device you’re using.

With the note taking tools that I mentioned earlier, doing that is easy. All you need to do is log into the websites of those tools and you’re set. You don’t need any desktop software. If you’re using a tablet or a smartphone, there are mobile apps available for those tools.

Text files and word processor documents are a slightly different story. But you’re not without hope. You can use other file sharing and syncing tools.

In the end, though, the quality of your notes depends on you. On your focus. On the depth of your research. While a good digital note taking tool can make taking notes more convenient, that tool won’t do the job for you.

The humble (and often, not-so-humble) text editor. It can be a wonderful thing. I know more than a few people who are zealous about their editors, and view them in the same way that they view their toothbrushes. Yes, they’re that hardcore.

Having said that, I know more than a few people who actually shy away from text editors. Why? Because they view editors as strictly a programmer’s tool. Nothing could be further from the truth. Even though I’m not a coder of any stripe, I find a text editor to be a valuable tool. More than that actually. For me, a good text editor is indispensable for leading a plain text life.

You might be writing an article, either in straight text or with a markup language like Markdown. You might be editing the HTML of your web site. You might be peeking at a shell script. Or you might just be perusing a README file or change log for some software that you’re about to install. Pulling those kinds of files into a word processor is overkill.

Those are situations in which text editors are very handy. But with so many editors out there, how do you choose the one that’s for you? And by you, I mean someone who isn’t a software developer or (too much of) a techie. Someone who thinks that C is the third letter in the alphabet, for whom regular expressions mean an ordinary way of speaking.

Everyone has their own favourite editor. Here’s some advice I give to people who are looking for the right one for them.

What to Look For

Here are four things that I look for in a text editor. Your mileage (or whatever distance measurement you use) may vary.

First, the editor should pack some form of syntax highlighting — whether automatic or which you can turn on or off with a click or two. Why syntax highlighting? If you’re looking at any markup language (or even some code), black text on a white background tends to all look the same. It really helps if tags or comments or functions have different colours from the rest of the text. I can’t tell you how many times syntax highlighting helped me find unclosed tags in HTML.

Second, the editor should be fairly easy to extend. That includes

• I can add custom syntax highlighting definitions.
• It’s easy to link the editor to an external program that can process or validate the file I’m working with.
• The developers and/or user community supply plugins that can extend the editor in a variety of ways.

Third, a spelling checker is a must, especially if you’re writing. Nothing more needs to be said about that.

Fourth, the interface should be clean. No ribbon a la Microsoft Word. Instead, it should have one toolbar and the ability to quickly show or hide side panes (which could contain anything from a list of files to additional commands). Also, I prefer an interface with tabs rather than an old school multiple document interface or a (gasp!) single document interface.

Some Suggestions

So, what editors do I recommend? I mainly work on the Linux desktop, so here a few for that operating system. And you don’t have to be a coder to appreciate them.

First up, Gedit. It took me a little while to warm up to Gedit, but when I did I couldn’t stop using it. Well, until I switched to elementary OS and started mainlining its default text editor. Gedit has the four main features that I look for in a text editor. What do I use it for? Mainly writing, with Markdown and without, and editing web pages. Gedit has nice Markdown and LaTeX plugins, and it also has a full-screen editing mode. Perfect for distraction-free writing.

Users of elementary OS have a simple but effective option editor that comes with the distribution called Code. It's not the most feature-packed editor around, but it's great if your needs are simple. Code has several useful plugins — like a spelling checker, word completion, and browser preview of HTML files — along with syntax highlighting and a solid search and replace function.

I don’t use KDE anymore. But when I did, I used Kate as my sole editor. All of my KDE-using friends do the same, and with good reason. Like Gedit, Kate has the four features that I look for in a text editor — its syntax highlighting, plugin support, and boomarking are great. As well, it’s clean and fast. While Kate isn’t enough to tempt me back to the KDE world, I’d definitely use it if I ever did go back.

While Geany is essentially a programmer’s tool, there’s a lot in it for the average user. And if you’re working with straight text or HTML or LaTeX, it’s a good choice. Geany also has a number of plugins that can really beef up its set of features. Plus Geany supports Markdown, which is a nice bonus.

On other operating systems, I've enjoyed using BBEdit for MacOS and NotePad++ whenever I've had to use Windows. Both editors do a lot, but even for someone with simple needs BBEdit and NotePad++ can be great choices.

If you’re wondering why I didn’t mention Emacs or vi(m), I just didn’t want to go there.

• Why You Should Ditch Microsoft Word for NotePad
• My Journey Into A Powerful Digital Note-taking System. From Paper to Plain-text
• The return of fancy tools
• A Guide to Obsidian: Local, Markdown-Powered Networked Notes

imml

Putting together a small, simple web page or website doesn’t need to involve using a bulky content management system or a framework. You don’t even need to code in HTML, either. All you need to know is a little Markdown and imml does the rest.

imml, which you can use on the web or at the command line on your computer takes a file formatted with Markdown and converts it into a decent-looking web page. You can even create a multiple page site, all using a single file.

GitJournal

Want to take notes and/or keep a journal on your phone while embracing your inner geek a little? Then you might want to check out GitJournal.

It’s an Android app that uses git (a version control system that coders use) to store what you create. Once you hook GitJournal into whatever instance of git you’re using, it’s easy to write up daily journal entries or jot down notes. GitJournal supports Markdown, too.

(I’ll be taking a closer look at GitJournal in an upcoming article.)

Calendar.txt

It’s not an application. Instead, Calendar.txt is a simple, clever way to keep track of appointments, events, and the like using a plain text file.

Using Calendar.txt is shockingly simple. Download the calendar template (which is set up dates), open it in a text editor, and add to it. The file is small and you can share it between your computers and devices using your sync tool of choice.

Left

I can’t tell you how many open source projects started life as a way to solve a problem their creators were facing. Left is one of those projects. It was developed to address the twin problems of using older hardware and living on a sailboat with a limited supply of electricity.

Left is a simple, useful distraction-free editor. It’s designed for writing longer-form documents — books, long essays, tracts. Anything broken into discrete sections. If you format what you’re working on using Markdown, Left generates a table of contents that lets you quickly jump to a section. It also has some nifty features like autocompletion and the ability to select a word’s synonym.

Most of us who blog, especially those of us who have personal blogs, can get away with a minimalist blog. Personal bloggers, unless they want to embrace their inner geeks, shouldn’t have to worry about confusing interfaces, about tweaking themes or messing with plugins, about twiddling and twerning the settings of a static site generator. They just need to type or drop post into an editor and click Publish.

A while back, I talked about a blogging platform called Write.as (which I use extensively, in case you’re wondering) that does this very well. Believe it or not, you can make your blogging experience even simpler and more minimal with Mataroa

Getting Started

Mataroa is a hosted service. Like any hosted service, you need to sign up to use it. It’s free, although you can later pay $9 (USD) a year which enables you to hook a custom domain into your blog and get automatic exports via email.

So you’ve signed up. Now what? Set up your blog. Do that by entering this information:

• User name (which becomes your subdomain). For example, if you enter my blog, your subdomain is myblog.mataroa.blog.
• An email address (for recovering your password if you forget it).
• Your blog’s name and a short tagline describing it.

You can also enable comments on your blog and whether or not readers can receive your latest post via email. In case you’re wondering, the commenting system simple and baked into Mataroa. You get an email every time someone posts a comment.

Here’s an example of the settings of a blog I set up:

How Mataroa Structures Your Blog

Unlike some blogging platforms which display posts when you land on them, the front page of a blog on Mataroa displays links to your posts on the landing page.

The latest post appears at the top of the list. There’s no way to change the format of the front page.

Writing and Publishing

After you’ve logged into Mataroa, click the New post link at the top of the screen. The Create a new post screen displays.

Enter a title for your post.

The Publication date field contains the current date. Keep that to publish the post today. If you want to schedule the post to publish in the future, enter a date in the Publication date field. Or leave it empty to save the post as a draft as you work on it.

Start typing in the Content field. Mataroa supports Markdown for formatting. You can also drag and drop images into the Content field to include then with a post.

Here’s an example of a post in Mataroa:

When you’re ready, click Save to publish the post. A link to the post is added to the front page of your blog.

Importing Posts

If you have one or more files formatted with Markdown, you can upload them by going to the Dashboard and clicking Import posts. Browse for the files that you want to import and then click Upload.

After you import the posts, Mataroa saves them as drafts.

Before publishing, you can edit the posts and add a publication date to them.

Adding Pages

By that, I mean an About page, a /now page, a /uses page, a contact page. Anything that supplements your blog or, if that’s your purpose, turns your Mataroa blog into a simple website.

To add a page, go to the Dashboard and click Pages. Then, click Create a new page.

Add a title and some text. When you save the page, Mataroa adds a link to the page in the footer of your blog’s main page and on every post.

An Annoyance

For me, this is the main one. That annoyance involves the footer on pages. the one I mentioned above, which contains links to the pages on you blog or site.

There doesn’t seem to be a way to change the position of that footer. You might want it centred on the page. You might want ti right aligned. Me? I’d prefer that the links to the pages be at the top of a blog, below the blog’s title. Sadly, you can’t move it.

Final Thoughts

As you can see, Mataroa makes even something as stripped down as Write.as look bulky. It’s definitely the apotheosis of minimalist blogging.

Mataroa packs no frills. There are corners of the internet that would say the lack of frills is a weakness of Mataroa, that it makes the platform all but useless for serious blogging.

I disagree. That lack of frills is a strength. Using Mataroa, you can you can quickly and easily set up a simple blog or even a web site. Because it’s powered by plain text, Mataroa enables you to focus on your words and ideas. Its support for Markdown is a bonus.

Here is what’s new in this edition:

• A new chapter that covers how to use pandoc to convert your files formatted with Markdown to HTML, word processor formats, and PDF files.
• The list of tools for working with Markdown has been updated and expanded.
• A number of general tweaks and minor changes and updates.

If you purchased a previous edition of Learning Markdown at Gumroad, you’ll have received an email with information on how to get the new edition of the book for free. If you haven’t received that message, please contact me.

If you haven’t bought the book, here’s your chance. You can read a sample chapter if you’re curious. And if you’re ready to buy the book, you can find EPUB and PDF versions on Gumroad.

While TeX is powerful, I found that I had to do quite a bit of fiddling to bend it to my will. Then, I discovered LaTeX. LaTeX was a revelation, thanks to its tools (like pdflatex) and document classes that made using an attractive layout easier.

While I’ve been using LaTeX on and off since then, I don’t consider myself an expert or even highly proficient. I know enough to do what I need to do, and maybe a little more.

Here’s a quick look at how I use LaTeX.

A Narrow Focus

Mainly, I use LaTeX to typeset:

• Books
• My CV
• The occasional report or letter

There are a few other types of documents that I write and typeset using LaTeX, but I don’t work on them all that often. No matter what I’m working on, though, I use one template or another.

Templates, Templates

My templates include all the settings — like which document class to use, metadata for PDF files (where applicable), and page layout — for what I’m working on. I create a file and start typing. Where needed, I add LaTeX markup. In case you’re wondering, I take advantage of Gedit’s LaTeX plugin to make that easier and faster.

If you’re wondering what one of those templates looks like, here’s a peek at one of the book templates that I use:

What About Converting from Markdown?

If what I’m writing will be in a format like PDF, then I stick to working solely in LaTeX. But if I’m publishing something, like an ebook I’m selling, then I’ll format the chapters with Markdown and convert the book to EPUB and LaTeX using Pandoc. From there, I’ll create the PDF from the LaTeX file.

For the conversion from Markdown, I have a separate template. That template contains all the setting I need, along with a bunch of Pandoc-specific directives that I don’t fully understand. That said, once I have the LaTeX file, I run the pdflatex command to create a nicely-typeset PDF file.

Final Thoughts

A couple of three people have told me that the way in which I use LaTeX is a bit of a waste. That I’m not using LaTeX and its tools to their full potential.

So what?

While I can start with Markdown and go to LaTeX, there are times when I enjoy using LaTeX straight, no chaser. For me, it’s a bit of a challenge but one that keeps me sharp.