Tools Roundup - July 13, 2022

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

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.