Comment by cdiamand | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cdiamand | Hacker News Reader

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I recently surveyed a writer about their software woes.

Response:

"I am a writer - fiction and non-fiction.

I haven't found good software to keep my notes, sentences, ideas, etc. in a way that helps me easily incorporate them into the project I am working on.

Oftentimes, I will come up with a sentence or a paragraph that I want to put in my story at a later time. It's just a moment - an idea- that comes up that I want to save for later use. Well, guess what, these ideas start piling up and I could have a huge pile of sentences/paragraphs that I will use to build my story. But hey, I don't know just yet where I want to place them to tell the most effective story.

I want a section in the particular file I am working on where I can keep these ideas instead of having a whole separate "ideas" file or worse, scribbled on a paper napkin.

I'd like to be able to easily drag and drop that paragraph/sentence from my ideas section right into my story without having to do the annoying cut and paste or worse, figuring out what file I saved that great sentence in.

I'd pay $130+ for it."

Sounds like this writer is talking about two different things:

1. dragging/pasting ideas from an idea section directly into a writing program. This is where s/he's sitting comfortably somewhere actually working.

2. Scribbling ideas "on the fly" - which can happen anywhere (on the bus, walking down the street, etc..)

For the second, I like simplenote[0] and their tagging feature. Lots of support for various OSes. On 32-bit LinuxMint, I'm using nvPY[1] since simplenote doesn't have a 32-bit deb.

In order to solve both problems, the writing program could support something like simplenote via plugin. This way s/he gets their left-hand, drag/paste panel.

Note: also like https://standardnotes.org/ but could not get it to run on my older phone, no 32-bit linux support.

[0] https://simplenote.com/

[1] https://github.com/cpbotha/nvpy

emacs with org-mode?

Content organisation is ... a massive problem.

I'm thinking of writing a solution (or parts of one).

In the meantime: Index cards. Closing in on 10k of those.

scrivener?

Hm, looks interesting, but is there anything similar available for Linux?

I use a small chromebook as a primary workstation for its light form factor and ARM's low power usage/long battery life. So if it's Mac/Windows or closed source without an ARM binary, I can't use it.

Was about to say the same. Scrivener is your friend here, and it's not even $130

Honestly this reminds me a lot of the TempleOS editor.

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