Studies in Semicolons

Rice University history prof W. Caleb McDaniel wrote an academic book all in plain text. As an evangelist of plain text for academics, he does a better job than I could explaining why you should get off Word when you’re making serious ideas: the risk is just too darn high that you’ll lose something, be stuck on a single platform, or get distracted by heavy software.

To his list, I want to add two more ideas: searchability and versatility. Among the 117 plain text files currently sitting in my installation of nvALT (of which this post is number 117) sits essentially a corpus of every good idea I’ve had over the last four or five years: class notes, brainstormed ideas, conference articles, an aborted book, lectures and memos. Anytime I think of something, it can go here, and I know I’ll be able to find it again. It’s basically effortless to copy out of these files to send an e-mail to a colleague or open them in a program like FoldingText to brainstorm more deliberately.

The notes expand and contract and, somewhere in the middle of them, good ideas sit. When I need to think, write or solve a problem, I hit a hotkey on my computer and I type. To me, that’s a far more efficient (and elegant) way to make idea work more like idea craft.