[Cypher]

Just thought I'd post a note about my new workflow using Sublime Text 2 text editor which I think is a great addition to Omnifocus is a multi platform environment.

First some background. I've been using the Omnifocus Project Folders and Project Notes applescripts for a few years now. These have been posted about on the forums before. They give me a couple of toolbar icons to create a project folder and also a project note file for any of my OF projects. I have my project folders created in my dropbox hierarchy allowing my notes to be synced to my work computer and also to be available on my iPad and iPhone. This has worked well but was aways a bit of a fudge getting my notes available from windows machine. The scripts created an OmniOutliner note file which worked great on the mac but gave me a problem on windows where I couldn't read or edit them. My work around was to constantly have to remember to print the OO file to PDF so I could view the pdf. I would then make new notes in text files and have to again remember to update the OO file when I got home. My notes would quickly keep getting out of control.

As I have around 200 projects on the go it can be a lot of work to keep on top of where all my projects are up to, therefore anything I can do to aid this is a big bonus. So this last week I looked to change my workflow over to using plain text, markdown, note files. Doing this would allow me to edit them from my windows machines. I decided to look for a text editor which would also support markdown previews and whilst looking for a suitable text editor I came across Sublime Text 2 which is highly customisable and cross platform and has a vast array of plugins available for it including Markdown support.

Having my notes available and editable on any machine is a big plus but I also liked the ease of having the OO applescripts in my OF toolbar, so this weekend I rewrote the OF ApplesScripts so they would create the project and notes files as plain txt instead. I also extended the scripts to pre-populate the new text files with a standard template using markdown. Now as each note file is created it gives me a standard layout for all my projects. The project files are still stored in a dropbox folder which again mirrors my OF project layout.

With Sublime Text also being multi-platform and along with having dropbox this has allowed me to effectively have the same workflow on any computer. Another big benefit is Sublime allows you to create projects containing multiple files so I have configured a Sublime project to setup the sidebar to provide access to my OF dropbox folder structure in the same organised way as my OF folder structure. Any changes I make in dropbox are immediately mirrored in Sublime. This gives me quick access to all of my project note files at the same time in a multi tabbed window. With sublime being cross platform my works windows machine is now setup to run a similar project making it appear identical to my Mac, which makes my workflow so much easier.

I now write my notes in Markdown in plain txt files and being written in Markdown this allows me to quickly export them as formatted text to html or directly to pdf. Also having the OF applescripts in my toolbar gives me direct access to the note files straight from the toolbar and I can quickly create a new project note file in the same way.

I think Sublime & Dropbox make a great addition to Omnifocus if your someone who likes to keep a lot of notes about your project and it gets even better if your work across either Windows, Mac or Linux platforms.