Rethinking

I keep having these little epiphanies that make me question my own thinking process, because in retrospect they seem so obvious. It happens in all areas of life, but I’m talking about technical matters in this particular example.

I’m a writer, and I use Ulysses on my Mac — and iPhone, once in a while — to do all of my work. I keep my entire library in the app, as Markdown, and it’s a sort of database because the individual units are entries called sheets, rather than actual files. They have no filenames, for example, and are contained in a huge hierarchical set of virtual groups with various metadata.

You can export them as Markdown files, even en masse, but while they’re in the app their storage is opaque, just like with Apple Photos, or any other library-type proprietary software. So there must be compelling reasons to keep my oeuvre in that format, mustn’t there? Certainly: there are cross-references, goal tracking, and metadata entries like tags, images, and notes, plus special so-called “material” sheets which aren’t exported/published but serve as planning or reference documents, and so on. And I use pretty much none of that stuff.

Why aren’t I just keeping all of my work in the file system? There would be an up-front setup and configuration cost, especially for the publishing part of things — presumably using pandoc — but then I’d have something completely portable across not just devices but operating systems, and still retain all of the searching and collation and project functionality that I use (I think). Emacs, albeit with the binder minor mode, can even replicate the custom-ordered tree nature of writing projects, with tags and notes if required. And I could just switch immediately, since I still have my existing library with no urgency to move it over.

I still need to think about it a bit, but it’s a tempting prospect.