Org-mode is a great outliner/editor and I’ve been doing all my writing with it. The more I use org-mode the better I like it. But org-mode can’t do everything. BrainStorm excels at rapid sorting, reorganizing and brainstorming. Put org-mode and BrainStorm together and the synergy is terrific.
BrainStorm is a windows only program that I’ve been trying to get running properly on my Linux machine under Wine for almost four years. Wine released a new stable release earlier this month and BrainStorm is finally behaving.
I tried an experiment this morning. I used my portable AlphaSmart Neo for a freewriting session. When I was done, I dumped the file via USB cable to an org-mode file. Then I went through the file looking for interesting ideas, etc. Highlight some text, then press Ctrl-c x and the text is appended to a list in another buffer. When I reached the end of the text, I saved my list and fired up BrainStorm (BS).
Then I merged the list file with the file open in BS and sat down to play. BS has powerful tools for sorting and moving topics around, for creating order out of chaos which is what I did.
Now what? How to get my BS file back into org-mode? I wrote a perl script a few years ago that would take a tab indented file written from BS and create a file that I could load into Lyx (a front end for LaTeX). I spend hours trying to modify that program to translate the BS file into an org-mode file without success. I found a perl script on the old BS bulletin board that was posted there almost six years ago by Tony. His script takes a BS file and translates it so LaTeX understands it.
I took Tony’s perl script as the basis for a new perl script that makes an org-mode file out of a BS tab indented text file. It works! So now I have a two way street and can go back and forth between org-mode and BS.
I have high hopes for the synergy between these two programs. You might wonder what happened with MaxThink. Well, as good as MaxThink was, it’s too old, and has to run in a separate environment. I bought a licence for BS during the summer of 2006 because MaxThink was old and tired then. The reason I resurrected MaxThink was because the behavior of BS under the older version of Wine was quirky enough to keep me away. I’m happy that BS is working nicely now (knocking on wood). Stay tuned for further adventures.
So, this post was written with BS?
No. I wrote the post directly in org-mode.
Now I’ve gone and done it. I installed the Scrivener Linux beta 1.1.0 this morning. Who knows where this experiment might lead?
Brainstorm is one I think I need to take for a test drive with my new novel. I have the outline (read football play) scribbled in my tablet, but it needs to be someplace where I can really work the kinks out of the tendrils. I think BS may just be the ticket…
Thank you, John.
Red.
So here I am, cranking away in BS and the $%@#* program crashes. Dirty whatsafrash, rammy packalouver! So now what? Keep on? I want Linux native programs but??? Anyway. Scrivener, a neat writing environment that was only available on Mac in the past, released a Windows version recently. They released a new version Monday along with a new Linux beta. I installed the beta and will be evaluating. The beta is free, the Windows version costs $40 but you get 30 non consecutive evaluation days before you have to register. Might be worth a try.
Their website has some nice comprehensive video tutorials. Might be worth a look?
John
Boo! Hiss! Sounds as though it has some decent support. Is it a similar enough concept to substitute for BS?
Red.
Scrivener is a non-linear writing tool. You write in discrete chunks of text (your choice — scenes are a good starting place). Each chunk has a synopsis attached that looks like an index card. Outline view, document or project notes. All kinds of neat tools. Check out the video tutorials on their website. http://www.literatureandlatte.com/video.php
John
Sweet! Thanx. I will the moment I unbury myself from 404 errors. Flipping Google.
Red.
You might look at yWriter5, it’s a freebie and not bad — gets good reviews.
Dropped in hopper. The video is open for me to watch…
Red.
You might be able to use MaxThink in a somewhat native Linux environment.
Try this the following:
Install dosemu
Create a directory called ~/max
Copy MAX.EXE, your Configxx.mt and other supporting files into ~/max
Create an alias as follows:
alias max=”dosemu ~/max/MAX.EXE”
From within your ~/max directory, type max
If this works, add the alias max=”dosemu ~/max/MAX.EXE” line to .bashrc
You may also want to look at the man pages for expand, unexpand, unix2dos and dos2unix. These will help you to tab and untab outlines among other things.
Enjoy…
An issue with my current setup is that all input and output files must reside in the ~/max directory. Another challenge is that MaxThink for DOS isn’t Y2K compliant and thinks this is the year 112