Software for organizing blocks of text within files

Question

I'm looking for a simple program that takes as input text files, allows me to tag them on a relevant paragraph or subsection, and combine those tagged text snippets in files corresponding to each of those tags. For example:

[idea] "this block contains an idea and where I stumbled on it"
[booknote] "this block is a quote from a specific text"
[idea][todo] "something I need to get done that is associated with an idea for some other endeavor"

This would result in, for e.g., a file "idea.txt" that contains the first and third lines along with a timestamp for the write date of these various snippets or of the last write date of the files they come from. In terms of scale, there are a few hundred files to process.

I've seen references to Evernote, OneNote in this thread (How can a writer efficiently manage many text snippets?) but are they best suited for the task I'm after? I wasn't sure if they'd work with text snippets or only whole files that have been tagged. I'm also looking for a lightweight application and to run all this locally and not upload my files to the cloud.

Answer 1

I've not used it, but it sounds like Org Mode might do what you want. It requires emacs which runs locally, although given your markup and output needs perhaps a bespoke solution would be necessary.

Answer 2

If you know how to, or like to learn scripting, you could, depending on your OS, look into bash (Linux, Mac) or Power-Shell (Windows) scripting to filter lines from the file with a tool like grep and then pipe it to a secondary file. You could even script it.

Here's a short example (Mac OS command line):

cat file.txt | grep -i "\[idea\]" > idea.txt

Which would produce the file idea.txt:

[idea] "this block contains an idea and where I stumbled on it"
[idea][todo] "something I need to get done that is associated with an idea for some other endeavor"

However, if you wish to go the script route, I recommend regular Stack Exchange.

If you just want to keep notes and assorted thoughts in some software, you might want to look into Microsoft One Note. It won't necessarily abide with your specific structure, but it has a well functioning structure itself.

If you wish to keep track of to-do-list items. I recommend, RememberTheMilk. It too uses its own structure of the information. (Come to think of it, RTM with tags will do exactly what you want, but with a web interface, check it out!)