How to Do It

Something like this may work for Classic Mac, but these instructions are for OS X. The next two paragraphs describe two things you need to do in the Terminal or whatever interface you use for the commandline:

Go to the root directory (/) and make a symbolic link to either your home directory (/Users/yourname) or to another directory where you plan to keep the files associated with your Tinderbox notes. The former choice has the advantage that (assuming all of these files will be stored somewhere underneath your home directory) you will only need to make one of these links, but the disadvantages of worse security in some situations and longer URL attributes. You can choose a more specific directory for this purpose and link to that instead. Either way, you need root permissions for this step.

Make the identical symbolic link in the document root of your local web server. This is the place from which Apache (or your alternative) serves index.html if you enter http://127.0.0.1 in your web browser. If you have not edited /etc/httpd/httpd.conf then this will be /Users/yourname/Sites. You could eliminate one link by making your document root "/", but I don't think that's a good idea.

Now back in Tinderbox, open a note that you wish to handle with an external editor. Define its URL attribute to be file://127.0.0.1/link/path/to/file, where for "link" substitute the name you chose for the symbolic links the the previous two steps, and "path/to/file" is the rest of the unix-style path from the linked directory. For example, I have symbolic links to /User/lee called "lee"; if I want to store my note contents in a file called "cakeRecipe.html" in my Documents folder, the URL will be file://127.0.0.1/lee/Documents/cakeRecipe.html. Don't forget the file extension ("html" in this case), which may not be displayed in the Finder.

The attributes ViewInBrowser and AutoFetch must be true for the notes that you want to edit externally (make a stamp or prototype for this). Actually, ViewInBrowser need not be set; in that case you merely need to hit the note's little globe icon to open the external editor.

If you are using Tinderbox merely to keep references to the documents and perhaps associate attributes with them, then the text areas of the notes can remain empty (and you need not set AutoFetch, contrary to what I said above). However, for most applications, when you are done editing your notes, you will need their updated contents to be inserted back into Tinderbox. This is the case if you are using Tinderbox to export these notes, or if you want their texts available for searching manually or by aliases. In this case, close all the note windows, open the network window (Apple-3), and hit "Fetch Now". Tinderbox will ask your local web server for the documents and fill the notes.

This method takes advantage of a Tinderbox quirk, where the protocol part of the URL attribute is ignored when performing the network fetch: that's why you can use "file://". When "viewing in browser" to edit, the file URL is passed to the System which opens the file using the associated application. If this quirk is fixed then I will have to come up with a modified method.