I couldn't
find anything else, that's why.
I use NBMM to:
- collect bits of text.
Thousands of them. Megabytes of them. My main notes file currently comprises 5,622,544 bytes in 3,749 notes. Many of them were written by me, most are net-clippings.
- search through those bits of text.
For instance, I just dug those 3,749 notes to turn up the 5 containing "Linux", "Windows" and "booting" to see what I had on dual-booting. It took 0.3 seconds (on a K6-2/450MHz/128MB computer) with case-sensitivity turned on. Turning it off found an additional 2 notes, but took 3.7 seconds. There are "better" alternatives, but mostly they're too complicated. (SQL? Grep? Install web server software?? Aiigh!)
- categorize and classify those bits of text.
I can gather a whole pile of stuff into Notes (the standard category), then pick through it over time and sort it into an order that suits me. The general idea was to assemble a novel bit by bit from parts.
- edit those bits of text.
I'm coding this HTML page in NBMM. I could use Kate or Bluefish, and have done so in the past, but they're too sluggish on this puny computer. Also, the NBMM editor is hand-tooled by yours truly, with approximately-real-time word-counting,1 various automatic text-insertion features, and several unusual methods of navigating around the text (such as by a listing of all occurrences of a particular search word or phrase).
- set word-count goals for those bits of text. I participate in National Novel Writing Month, so keeping track of how many words I have to go to reach 50,000 can be quite handy. (And now NBMM has progress bar displays.)
- export those bits of text -- by category or class or arbitrary selection, as collections of notes or single files of plain text...or in extreme cases, honking great HTML pages: the main documentation page on this site was generated automatically by NBMM, with minor tweaking thereafter. Well, I like it.
Aha, you say, you can do all that with TreeMangler and OutlineDancer and suchlike. To which I reply, yes, but tree outlines hide everything. I like to see as much of what I've got as possible -- hence the spreadsheet layout. Actually a virtual desk covered with self-arranging papers would be even better, but I couldn't figure out how to do it.
That's why why why why why why.
Disclaimer: Notebox Mismanager was written for its author's own purposes, is a work in progress, contains suboptimal and ugly code, doubtless has bugs, and certainly has a number of idiosyncrasies.
1. "Approximately real time?" Well, the original word-counter I wrote had a granularity of ten words, for good reason I might add, so there was no point in re-counting every time there was a keypress. Also, it slowed things down too much. So it counts only when the text grows or shrinks by 30 characters, or 5 words.