FoldingText – Plain text productivity for Mac users
Hi, this is Jesse. I am original designer&#x2F;creator of FoldingText. Mutahhir has since taken the project over while I continue to work on TaskPaper and WriteRoom. I see a number of FoldingText history questions. I&#x27;ll try to answer all of those here.<p>The idea of FoldingText evolved from:<p>1. Out of college I got to work on the Jazz ZUI (Zooming User Interface) toolkit and then build it&#x27;s successor Piccolo. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cs.umd.edu&#x2F;hcil&#x2F;piccolo&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cs.umd.edu&#x2F;hcil&#x2F;piccolo&#x2F;</a>. For me this was a super cool project to work on. I liked to take notes and tried&#x2F;build various ZUI notes apps. Great fun but I always ended up using plain text files on my desktop instead of fancy ZUI app.<p>2. I gave up on ZUI for notes and decided instead to build Hog Bay Notebook, a Mac app for notes. Similar concept to Evernote (but a few years before I think). Database of text files with a full text index for searching. After a few years I was making my living selling this app, but I would still tend to go back to keeping my notes on desktop in TextEdit.<p>3. Around this time <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ulyssesapp.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ulyssesapp.com</a> added &quot;full screen mode&quot; to their app. Was a popular feature, but Ulysses was a big app with lots of other features that I didn&#x27;t really want. So I spent a week making WriteRoom 1.0. WriteRoom was a very basic text editor with one feature... that it could zoom into a nice fullscreen mode. It originated the term &quot;Distraction free writing&quot;... so yeah for that! :) This quickly sold better then my notebook program which had at that point I&#x27;d put years of work into.<p>4. This lead me to the conclusion that there&#x27;s a market and need for simple text based alternatives to &quot;major&quot; apps. Many people saw WriteRoom as a MS Word alternative, even though it was much, much, simpler.<p>5. At the time 2005&#x2F;2006 &quot;Getting Things Done&quot; apps were becoming popular, but they were pretty complicated. Lots of chrome surrounding a simple list of tasks. I created TaskPaper as a simple text alternative to OmniFocus. The original versions were just a little syntax highliting built into TextEdit. But over time I wanted a better solution for handling large complex todo lists and so started building in outlining and filtering into the app. After a few years the end result is that TaskPaper is an outliner data model presented&#x2F;edited through a plain text editor.<p>6. At this point we get to FoldingText. I didn&#x27;t want to keep bolting features onto TaskPaper... I wanted it to stay &quot;Plain text todo lists&quot;. But TaskPaper&#x27;s underlying outliner model with a text UI seemed like it would be good a many other things. FoldingText was my attempt to generalize the outline mode&#x2F;plain text UI into a platform that other&#x27;s could extend. Along the way I decided to use Markdown as the plain text format that would define the underlying outline structure. I regret that decision. It added a lot of complexity (keeping markdown parsed into runtime outliner model) and made most people think of FoldingText mostly as a markdown editor. FoldingText become a good markdown editor, but the Markdown focus clouded the bigger goal for me.<p>7. By this time there were 4 of us working at Hog Bay Software. Mutahhir and I worked mostly on FoldingText. And then Mac apps stopped selling so fast and we didn&#x27;t&#x27; have money to continue. Hog Bay Software had to shrink down to only me again. And I didn&#x27;t have resources to keep working on all the apps. So I&#x27;ve refocused to work on TaskPaper and WriteRoom again. While Muthahhir has taken over the FoldingText project and is working on a big release soon.<p>Along the way I&#x27;ve looked to lots of apps for inspiration.<p>Early outliners in particular. But while I like them, they are problematic on how constraining they are when editing... they are field based so you only edit one line at a time. That&#x27;s why I prefer using the outliner data model, but presented as unconstrained plain text editor.<p>Besides the history described above FoldingText was most inspired by the Cannon Cat. Maybe not so much in every feature and implementation, but in the large idea of a text based user interface.