![]() I don't say that to announce my retirement to a tropical island (I prefer the mountains anyway), but to say that it feels amazing to find out I'm not crazy. It's the cornerstone of my little software company, and over fourteen years has been a large (and small) source of my income.Īnd, yet, TextBuddy has already had more downloads in thirteen days than VHX had in all of 2020. I'm also excited to say that, over the last two weeks, TextBuddy has become the most well-received app I've ever built. From Unix-y shell script type stuff to common tasks programmers use daily to crazy workflows like capturing text from screenshots and images and even transcribing spoken words from audio and video files. The app now offers over 130 nerdy, plain-text commands you can run with a keystroke or two. What started on January 14th as a single text field in a window that automatically saved what you typed kept growing. So, I found myself in need of a middle ground app between Drafts and TextMate. But going back to the old Getting Things Done philosophy of " mind like water," the fewer decisions I have to make about unrelated tasks while focusing on my work, the better job I can do at the stuff that matters. I fully realize the above must sound insane to a lot of people. Drafts solves the problem of thinking in files, and I know it's a fine line, but there's an obvious (to me) category of "stuff" that I don't want polluting my Drafts library, which means I need to think about deleting any temporary drafts I create. Making a new one, and then choosing where to save the file or discard my changes. TextMate, being a document editor, requires thinking about files. Ulysses, while incredibly powerful, is slow and cumbersome to move around. ![]() There's mental overhead to using those other three apps. Which, for sixteen years, has been my go-to editor for manipulating text.īut now and then, I've felt a need for something to drop truly temporary text into - a staging ground to do a few quick edits before taking that text elsewhere. Computers are powerful, storage is cheap, and having that corpus of my historical train of thought is a powerful weapon for knowledge workers.Īnd then, of course, there's TextMate. Still, to me, Drafts has become this massive, chronological archive of all the ideas I've had every day over the last decade or so. While some of my drafts grow larger and graduate to Ulysses, most of the stuff I capture might be considered "throw-away" by other people. (I'm writing this post in it right now.)ĭrafts is where I jot down quick notes, ideas, and triage ad-hoc to-do lists. ![]() Ulysses is where I keep meeting notes and draft long-form writing since it excels in being a very comfortable writing environment, handles Markdown well, and supports file attachments. I typically bounce around between three text editors throughout the day. (Hint: madness) In my case, it ends with this blog post announcing TextBuddy. Programmers know all too well where that line of thinking ends. But then my dumb brain was like, "Hey, it sure would be great if it also did this.Oh, and this, too.And that!" Sure enough, I had something passable by lunch. ![]() And followed soon by "Ok, I can make that really quick." It started as an "ugh, I wish I had a small little app that did this" thought going through my head. And now I'm finally getting around to sharing why I built it. Two weeks ago, I released TextBuddy - a new text editor for macOS. You either die a programmer, or you live long enough to see yourself build a text editor.
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