Gee, thanks for the left-handed compliment. ;-)

But, seriously, I think you answered your own question here.

Whenever you look at planning stuff like this — and this goes for tagging, filing, or any other kind of organizational widgetizing — it’s worthwhile to ask yourself what any extra layer of organization buys you and when you’ll see that value. Examples.

If a given text file is just a flat dump of lines (grocery list, ideas for future blog entries), then you probably need zero organization. Just keep appending new lines.

If it’s still a flat dump, but chronology is important, same goes. Just append to the bottom and maybe add a date header to each section. I like Markdown, so mine might look like:

### 2008-01-22 05:45:04
* foo
* bar
* bat

But then if you really need lots of organization inside the document, again, I’d go with Markdown or something similar that has syntax highlighting and semantic hooks inside your text editor of choice. E.G. when I write stuff in Markdown and use HTML “<Hn>“s like the one above, Textmate adds all those to a drop down menu that makes jumping thru the document very easy.

Just don’t make this more complicated than it needs to be. Be crazy-consistent about how you name files (that’s huge), but I wouldn’t get too wound up about text formatting until patterns start to emerge from real-world usage. Then just go for consistency over fanciness.

stuff that might help:

• How does a geek hack GTD?
• My txt setup
• Entourage & txt: In which the farmer and the cowman become friends
• My GTD txt template
• 43 Folders: “Text” (all posts about “text”)
• site:43folders.com text|txt|text files|plaintext - Google Search

Besides all the great stuff right here on 43F that Merlin mentions, there is a fair amount of good stuff on text files over at lifehacker.com. Personally I use Gina Trapani’s todo.txt (todotxt.com) system for task management. I’ve tried plenty of others but it’s the only one that has stuck for me.

Org mode in emacs is nice for plain-text todo lists, scheduling, etc.

One of the nice things that it does is it’s table-making ability - it gives you well-formatted, plain text “|” delimited tables, which you can easily import to Excel if you want. Or a database, for that matter.

This is a nice solution to the classic trade-off between human readability and machine readability for structured data in plain text. Take a look at an xml file. Readable? Not so much.

Not sure I understand what is confusing you about line breaks. Are you talking about the unix/mac/pc inconsistencies re what characters or sequences of characters indicate line breaks, or something else?

More info about what you’re trying to do in plain text might help. I assume from the forum that you are trying to roll your own PIM, but more detail would help us come up with best practices recommendations.

For my timelogs I keep in my consulting business (http://www.rowdylabs.com), I have three vim macros:

which outputs:
1/22/2008 10:38:20 AM - START

which outputs:
1/22/2008 10:38:20 AM

and which outputs:
1/22/2008 10:38:20 AM - END

I then have a time tracking program (a quick python script you can email me at michael.langford@rowdylabs.com if you want it) that adds up all the time in a given text file. This allows me to bill clients accurately for hourly work, yet let them know I was doing things, and that I did take breaks off the clock and what they were. In those logs I often take notes on phone conversations as they’re happening as well.

I usually do a format like:

1/22/2008 10:38:20 AM - START
Flurbed the fliberty on the face

1/22/2008 10:44:30 AM
Having issues flurbing

But I intentionally keep it a little messy so I don’t spend a lot of time reformatting it. It’s like when I scribble all over the front page of my moleskine when I get it so I can use the thing rather than going “oooh pretty paper” and “that thought isn’t good enough for that pretty paper”

My web page is similarly generated from a template and plain text.

       --Michael

I used Text Edit (Tiger) for a long time, but do like to dress up the text also. Partly for functionality, partly because I have to look at it every day. I moved to using Bean (bean-osx.com) which adds more formatting tools on top of the Text Edit engine. You can tweak line spacing for example. Making a template is a good idea and very easy.

If you’re looking for a system that works well for both reading plain-text and as markup for conversion to something prettier, I recommend reStructured Text. It’s heavily used in the Python programming community — lots of tools that can be very easily installed on OSX/Windows/Linux exist — and there’s even a handy website called rst2a that’ll accept it and spit back a PDF or HTML file of your text, completely beautified. (rst2a also accepts style sheets, if you don’t like any of their defaults.)