Re: [Tb] Tinderbox, OmniOutliner, and GTD

An example that might clarify what some people might mean when
they say that Tinderbox is kind of an "island" is just the
issue of text editing. Services, AppleScript, and other parts
of modern Mac technology are a big part of the issue too, of course,
despite the more or less awkward ways to work around the lack of
support for them. But (hyper)text is really what Tinderbox is about,
and the text editing experience to be had within Tinderbox is
just not acceptable for anything but very short snippets.

If you disagree, I suspect you are either not very demanding of
your text editor or you've never become really intimate with a
powerful editor and don't understand the advantages of doing all your
editing with the same program.

In every application I use on my Mac that involves nontrivial
text editing I use the _same_ editor: the same customizations,
keybindings, behavior, spellchecking, etc. Whether using
my programs for email, newsreading, or the python interpreter,
when it's time to edit more than one line of text my favorite
editor pops up; when I'm done I'm back in the program with the
text wherever it's supposed to be. I think this is important,
because text editing is a complex and specialized activity that
really requires a sophisticated, dedicated program, preferably
one that been refined over decades by a devoted community. My
text editor is the most important program on my machine.

So naturally I regard the lack of support for external editors
in Tinderbox to be a problem. There are awkward workarounds,
(http://lee-phillips.org/osx/tinderbox/tinderext/index.html)
but this is one of the reasons (for me, the big one) why
Tinderbox might be fairly criticized as having not been
designed with enough openness or extensibility in mind.
Received on Tue Jun 20 2006 - 17:09:11 EDT