PTPL 195 · 2 Links and 1 Idea to Make Plain Notes More Enjoyable

Tools and inspiration to enhance your plain text practice

Last week I promised to talk about filtering information with the built-in Search plugin in Obsidian. While that is busy cooking, here are two links and one idea to brighten up your plain text workflow.

Link 1: Thymer Notes for techies (not me; might be you)

“ The IDE for tasks, notes, and planning”

Thymer is a new way to take notes that looks to potentially fit well with my no-gatekeeper rule, if you self-host. The website looks promising. Silver Bullet is another self-hosted notes solution I’ve mentioned before, that gets a higher score than Thymer. It truly keeps data human readable and local.

Link 2: Bauhaus Clock version 2 (new release), Mac only

“ Turn waiting into watching”

I love the way Atilla Taşkıran approaches his work. He’s putting in details that perhaps no one but him will ever know are there, and building it to be as perfect as a digital clock screensaver can possibly be. And people are responding with not just positive feedback, but full letters of appreciation!

This is not a cheap utility. It doesn’t materially improve my notes. But it makes me smile, and inspires me to put the same amount of care into my work each time I see it.

Idea: Using one writing tool per writing task can help you stay focused

Cogmodo uses Drafts for short form writing, BBEdit for processing final drafts, iA Writer for journal entries, Obsidian as a personal database, and Ulysses for complex, longform writing.

I use Drafts for initial ideas, VS Code for plain text accounting, and Obsidian for pretty much everything else.

What about you?

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