I have so many text editors. Apparently, I collect them, like my grandmother collects crystal dolphin statues. We both have some issues to work out 😉

On a desktop, I tend to use only three: Ulysses for writing, VSCode for local development and Neovim for remote development.^[1] But as soon as I drop down onto iOS I can’t seem to help myself. Just on my homescreen I have Drafts 5, Drafts 4, NotePlan, Apple Notes, Ulysses. There are probably another 5 or 6 that I’ve yet to delete or use every so often that I am convinced I might need it eventually.

I’m not going fully minimalist, but I do think 10 text editors probably excessive. I’m going to keep most of the text editors on my homescreen, perhaps with the exception of Drafts 4 once I migrate everything over to the newer version, and I’ll use them for specialised roles within my life.

Here’s what I had in mind:

1. Drafts 4/5 is where I dunk snippets of text until I’m ready to do something with them; the first port of call to capture whatever nonsense is in my head.
2. NotePlan is where my workout plan and diary will live.
3. Apple Notes is for things I need to hold on to for some indefinite period of time (RIP Evernote).
4. Finally, Ulysses is where I write my love letters to the Internet.

Not ground breaking, but I think it should work just fine. Often what works better than fiddling around with an entire new setup or set of apps is just to create a simple system for what you have.

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1. Come to think of it, one of these days I should probably just whittle that down to Ulysses for writing and Neovim for noodling around in code. ↩︎