Using FoldingText with DEVONthink

FWIW I’m thinking of adjusting my DEVONthink / OmniFocus integration scripts so that project notes can be held in DT as FoldingText outlines, as an alternative to OmniOutliner outlines.

As an outliner, I’m finding FoldingText unusually fast and fluid, and its use of plain text files (in the Markdown idiom) is appealing in terms of DEVONthink preview and search, quite apart from anything else. (It also has a very interesting XPath-style query language under the hood). Is anyone else using FoldingText as their primary DEVONthink note editor ?

I’ve written a preliminary (Omni-related) script http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthread.php?t=26022 which may give a sense of the FoldingText scripting interface, and may also trigger some thoughts about potential DEVONthink integration.

Accordingly, the script which I use (through Keyboard Maestro) for opening the selected record in DEVONthink (simplified version attached), now offers FoldingText and Marked as the default editors for text records.
OpenREC.scpt.zip (12.1 KB)

I have been using FoldingText for a few weeks now, and I’m finding more and more uses for it. I’m also beginning to wean myself off of OmniOutliner-I’d actually already started doing this with TaskPaper before FoldingText was released. I’ve been too focused on a couple of projects to have any time to try your FoldingText scripts yet, but I want to do that soon as I see they are getting some favorable buzz. Thanks for sharing them.

Robin, thank you for this. I’ve been using FoldingText alongside Marked, and both are excellent. I’m looking forward to greater things from FoldingText – including perhaps custom modes (plugins) that will allow for deeper integration with DEVONthink. There is an interesting example in FoldingText’s knowledge base showing use of FT with the Pomodoro technique. It can be used to support a research workflow in DEVONthink.

I notice that FoldingText is in the App Store this morning. I must do a little work on scripting support for using it with DEVONthink and OmniFocus, and adopt some of Korm’s suggestions.

Here are the property list types that I use most often in the OpenREC script.


--TEXT: FoldingText, BBEdit, or Marked
--HTML: BBEdit, Safari, DEVONagent Pro
--JPG: Acorn, Flare, or Preview
--PNG: Acorn, Flare, or Preview
--PDF: Preview or PDFpenPro
property plstTypes : {¬
	{"Text", "com.foldingtext.FoldingText", "com.brettterpstra.marky", "com.barebones.bbedit"}, ¬
	{"HTML", "com.barebones.bbedit", "com.apple.Safari", "com.devon-technologies.agent"}, ¬
	{"JPG", "com.flyingmeat.Acorn", "com.artissoftware.flare", "com.apple.Preview"}, ¬
	{"PNG", "com.flyingmeat.Acorn", "com.artissoftware.flare", "com.apple.Preview"}, ¬
	{"PDF", "com.apple.Preview", "com.smileonmymac.PDFpenPro"}}

Another vote here for Folding Text.

I also use the timer function to “sprint” my writing process by allocating time to outline, research, write and review. This has increased my blogging output.