Uh, complete newbie here, and I feel like I'm walking into a high end programmers convention here and raising my hand red-faced to ask for a bit of kindergarten help. Everything in this forum is Greek to me. I am NOT a programmer. Repeat: I am not a programmer.
My intended usage for Leo is organizing notes & ideas. I'm raising my hand here because perhaps Leo's outlining/organizing capabilities may be what I need. I'm hoping folks here can tell me if I'm even knocking on the right door by looking at Leo. But it looks like Leo's flexibility in outlining may be unsurpassed and may be what I'm looking for. Hope so. I've looked for years for a software to help me organize my notes and ideas. Here's the problem: I've been journaling for 25 years, writing thoughts, notes, ideas on probably hundreds of topics, and totaling probably a few million words in a few thousand files. But I haven't done much organizing. Most of my journal files have notes on multiple topics. Generally my files are named by date rather than topic, though I have perhaps a few hundred by topic. For years I wrote in Word, often using outline format, usually writing most notes in one file per year, in outline format. If you're concluding it's a mess, you are right (though it could be worse). What's not in Word is mostly in text files. I switched to writing in Vim a few years ago, and am now writing in Spacemacs. Org mode has been recommended to me but I have not undertaken it. I suspect Leo is better than org mode for my needs but who am I to know? Is it? My project, which will undoubtedly take a couple of years, is to class and organize all notes into a "thoughtbase", perhaps comparable in some ways to a Zettelkasten. I want to sort through the mess, clip notes out by topic and organize them such that I can readily access anything and everything. I hope to cluster topics under a few (perhaps 25) main headings, some number of sub-headings, and individual topics with all notes on each topic stacked together. Perhaps there's a book or two or three there, but to find such a book or books will require that all this be organized so I can see it, access it, massage it, move clips around, stack them up, try things, remember things I wrote 20 years ago, .... Sound like fun? You don't have to answer that. My thought is to arrange all this in external plain text files initially, with the outline organization being in Leo, leaving the files external (eventually that is. Perhaps this isn't the best approach. But I'm getting ahead of myself. My first question is (and I'm hoping I've given a somewhat comprehensible thumbnail of what I'm looking for), is Leo capable of this, or perhaps Leo in combination with other software? Maybe some of the text-crunching and manipulating would be best done outside of Leo? BBEdit? DevonThink? InfoQube? Zettelkasten? Eastgate's Tinderbox? Heck I don't know. Oh yeah, MacOS High Sierra on an older (2010) iMac; just installed Leo 6.1. One reason I'm looking at Leo for this is that I think I'm going to have to just start bringing material into an outline system, note by note, and evolve the classing and relationships 'as she goes'. I think it would be too much to try to come up with the entire classing system out the outset. Evolve it instead. And I suspect that is where Leo may outshine any other. Is this true? Others claim similar qualities, where the optimum organization emerges as you bring more material into the system and deal with it as the spirit moves, piece by piece. Patterns emerge, relationships develop, that sort of thing. That is ultimately what needs to happen. Is Leo the best bet? Or some combo of software? In addition to some general thoughts on all this, I'd like a few pointers to get me started. I have learned how to create an external file in Leo, but I haven't found how to open/import a file (text or Word). That will be a key function in putting together a thoughtbase. I'm sure Leo can do, but I haven't discovered how to do it. Thanks, Andy -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "leo-editor" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to leo-editor+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/leo-editor/248fa329-2734-4d05-9660-3aee3a274fc3%40googlegroups.com.
