So I just had a ✨BAD TIME✨ with Scrivener, so I’m back to square 0. The editor is buggy and has some real jank, but I was willing to work around that until I was working on an image-heavy travel log (~3K words), and it hosed the exports in like…4 different ways:

• External links were stripped out until I checked a box
• Images with the same filename were silently overwritten
• Sometimes the export would pick a totally incorrect image
• The formatting for figure captioning was inconsistent

Not to mention that I was never a huge fan of its exporting toolkit. So, 2 after wasting 2 hours, I’m moving on.

I think I’m trying to get back to basics and avoid cramming everything into a single app, or always needing a network connection. A thought I had this morning was remembering that the filesystem is just another database.

This, of course, presupposes a few things:

• Accepting that iPad & iOS don’t have good filesystem management
• Because of the limitations of mobile devices, you still want to be “at the press” to publish anything of value
• If you’re on the go, you’re mainly just trying to hammer out an idea while waiting in line or on the kids/pets/etc

Chewing on it more, this is the line of thinking I’m going to try out:

We have forgotten The Filesystem

Because we’ve neglected the filesystem for so long, we’ve forgotten how useful it is for organization. Plus, it has so many things backed in (quick previews, tagging, cross-references via symlinks, naming conventions). Scrivener’s sidebar is essentially a version of a filesystem, but proved to be too buggy

You need distinct tools for each phase of the writing process

These are all actually distinct tasks with different needs:

• Collecting info: needs to not interrupt your current context/browsing
• Drafting: You need to be able to dump words/images into a drafts folder, to pick up the pieces later
• Editing: Wrangling all the disparate thoughts into something cohesive, which is where text editors/word processors come into play
• Typesetting & publishing: Putting something “to press” is hard work that requires a computer of some sort (whether desktop or web)

As long as I have editors that get words into the appropriate places in a filesystem, drafting is workable.

Editing is about cleaning up those artifacts.

Typesetting is a bit trickier, the only universal format I see is HTML (However you get there, whether it’s original text in Markdown, or a Word doc exported as a scrubbed HTML).

You know you’re a programmer when you try out Obsidian

I’ve resisted it for years because TBH I didn’t want yet another tool to tinker with or subscription, but Obsidian looks like It’s the only tool that checks (most) of the boxes:

• Since it’s Local First and relies on the filesystem, I get the benefits of the foundations of proper OSes
• It lets me drop stuff whenever for drafting, then clean it up later
• I can use whatever I want for the editing phase; such as iA Writer
• Since it’s Markdown, I can export to HTML for the final typesetting. And if I truly wanted to punish myself, I could write a plugin to streamline the exporting process to keep things in Obsidian
• For complex open-source collaboration like the (eventual) Practical Framework docs, I can use a git repo. This would have never been possible with Scrivener.

I did finally bite the bullet for Obsidian Sync, primarily to make it easier for the iOS/iPad apps to act as a draft pad.

Zotero for collecting info

Previously, I’ve been using a Notion DB to dump interesting links into, but it’s suffered the same fate as every other Notion DB.

I wanted to find a focused, cross-platform tool for collecting research info (which was one of the core appeals of Scrivener for me). Zotero is promising, being built specifically for academic research (so it has a level of rigor + organizational structure that I would have had to build out myself), and also supports common citation formats (something I want to get better at doing!)

Will report back!

I’ll report back, this is all very new (less than 24 hours), but I feel like the foundations are solid.

Also: don’t recommend any plugins to me! 😝 The last thing I need is to endlessly tinker; the most important thing is to write