Oh, the places you’ll write

Writing is a tool for thinking. Our environment is a reflection of our thinking. Our thinking is influenced by environment. Cluttered desk, cluttered mind. Clear desk, clear mind. Life imitates art. Art imitates life. Writing imitates thinking. Thinking imitates writing.

These are some of the places I write on a regular basis.

• Slack Channels. Of varying importance, with different cadences of replies, and different levels of focus on a time-boxed project or long lived area of responsibility.
• Slack Threads within Slack Channels. Whether or not a conversation continues in the channel or narrows to a thread is arbitrary. Based on the collective preferences, experiences, and norms of the first responder to a message. Which varies widely as an organization matures, silos break down, and new modes of collaboration emerge.
• Slack Canvases. Sometimes they’re tied to a specific Slack Channel. Sometimes they’re linked serendipitously across multiple channels. I like this feature of decoupling a canvas from a channel. It makes it easy to spin up a new channel for a focused and time-boxed conversation towards a clear milestone. But God help you if you need to search for a canvas that hasn’t been adequately pinned or bookmarked in a clear channel.
• iA Writer for documents of various sizes that will eventually be published somewhere else. It’s the best writing environment of the bunch. It’s distinct from publishing, which is a friction and a feature.
• iA Presenter for presentations that will eventually be published within a corresponding live (and most likely recorded) presentation. What would be “speaker notes” in Keynote are the driving force rather than an afterthought. This is powerful for clarifying thinking.
• Bear for jotting down notes about everything and anything. Quick thoughts that I may want to develop later. Keeping a digital journal. Early document development. Meeting notes. Captain’s log of my career. This is the single player space for just my stuff. Capturing notes and recalling them are both good enough.
• Apple Notes is used for multiplayer notes, mostly with my wife. It used to be the one stop shop that Bear has become. I replaced it with Bear because search and Shortcuts are too unreliable with each OS upgrade across macOS and iOS.
• Notion for documents that are shared to many people, and need to be referenced internally in perpetuity. Notion also provides a tradeoff of discoverability and approachability for multiplayer data tables that are probably more robust in Google Sheets.
• Google Docs every once in a while. When I remember it exists. And want the simplest forms of multiplayer document editing without the conceptual overhead of Notion’s anxiety inspiring nested permissions model.
• GitHub’s various tools of communication. Submitting a Pull Request. Reviewing other’s Pull Requests. Contributing to a Discussion. Commenting on specific commits.
• Vim for authoring commit messages. And quickly editing all sorts of text files from the command line.
• Things for drafting the communication of a certain size of desired action. Sometimes a wide open notes field in a single task provides all the space needed to prepare for publishing ephemeral text.
• Email. Both Gmail and Hey. I guess descriptions of calendar events are also places I write related to these suites.

Here’s what makes me sad. iA Writer and Vim are the only true text editors in the bunch. I can open a file from anywhere on the system. Make edits to the file. Save the file. Close the file.

Not so with Apple Notes and Bear. I can’t open a file in Bear. I have to import a file, make edits to the new representation in Bear’s internal database, and copy/paste my changes back to the original file. Bear has the ability to export to multiple formats, which is wonderful. But then I have to delete the note from Bear. My intent was using Bear as an editing tool for ephemeral text, not adding this text to my database of notes forever.

The web based software can be forgiven. It’s all about collaborative document making in multiplayer mode. Storing the files in a bespoke format somewhere that may or may not be on my computer is the costs of synchronous collaboration. I’m willing to pay that cost for certain needs.

When publishing happens is a question on my mind. Living documents are good. Showing every keystroke in realtime is often not what I want when I’m using writing for thinking. The git mindset of branches and commits is the granularity of living that feels right. But then again, I’m a developer who has these mental models of stepping stones and milestones fully ingrained.

All I really want is to right click a note in Bear, and say “Open in iA Writer”. Make some edits. Save. And they’d be reflected in Bear. That’s the most desired interaction pattern in my workflow. And they both speak Markdown as their primary dialect of plaintext.

I’m not saying anything new. I’m wanting for the known world of applications providing interoperability of known file formats. That’s the world I want to edit in. I understand the necessary complexity for multiplayer editing, resolving differences across time and flaky connectivity. But we can do better in the world of single player document editing. Then again, me on my iPhone and me on my Mac is another form of multiplayer editing. I just happen to be both players.

iCloud with iA Writer does this, though. And Obsidian promises this world. I just can’t get either to stick in my workflows. They’re great for capturing and iterating text. They’ve fallen short when I’m trying to reference mountains of text. Bear’s nested tagging and search is the superpower.

Writing takes many forms. Writing to communicate and writing to think are not distinct activities. That’s my current thinking, anyways.

Published: 2024-03-24

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