FMP: Pwning ubiquitous capture with self-creating / self-sorting text files

Or: If appending to any of a dozen or more important text files using one Quicksilver append trigger is wrong, who's got TIME to be right?

By Nick Fagerlund

UPDATE 6/8/06: HEY! So, people have been sending me stuff, and it's quite cool, but I haven't posted any of it on the website. I was actually thinking of doing some of that this week, since I'm under-UNDER-employed until next, but, er, my iBook kind of died horribly this Wednesday. (Late-model G3. Logic board. 'Nuff said.) It's in the process of being revived, and I have all of my data, but it's probably going to be a little longer before I can do anything FMP related. Thanks and HUGE apologies go out to everyone who's sent me cool and interesting programs; I wasn't expecting this little one-off to become a "project," so the warmness of the response has been really fun to watch. More soon!

Current version: fmp1.3.rb
Previous version: fmp1.2.rb

"Fiendish Master Plan" is just a not-particularly-innovative note-taking practice, combined with a dog-simple Ruby script that takes care of the boring parts. I'm pretty proud of it regardless. The name resulted from Historical Reasons, and can be, nay, ought to be, safely ignored.

Updates?

May 10, 2006: This is why open-source is the shit: you make something that pretty much works the way it's supposed to, you chuck it online, and then someone like David Douthitt comes through and rewrites the whole thing to make it stronger, faster, and better, for free. Thanks, David! Man, I love the lazyweb. Everyone else, enjoy version 1.3, available above.

New in version 1.3:

Previous versions opened and closed leaf files once per categorized line; easy to code, but it kind of makes the Baby Jesus cry. Now, categorized lines are cached in a hash and written out in a flash; any given leaf file will now be opened and closed a maximum of once per run.
The path to your Lists directory and the name of your fiend.txt file are now declared at the top of the file and referenced as variables throughout the code. If you want to store things somewhere other than ~/Lists or have your main file be named something sensible like "index" or something, you now only have to change it once. It'll probably behave better on Windows, too, though as always, you're on your own for that.

Executive summary!

You put all your random notes into one text file.
A "note" is a line—that is to say, a string of text ending in a newline character.
If a note belongs to category, you let FMP know about it by making "^category" the first word of the note.
When you run fmp.rb, it moves all notes of category into category.txt.
You don't have to worry about whether category.txt exists yet or not.

So basically, you can create and add to an arbitrary number of running lists (the names and nature of which are up to you) from within a single text file.

Why is that even useful?

It kind of depends on your personal levels of laziness and recalcitrance. But the basic idea here is that if your tools put up any sort of resistance, you're going to be slightly less likely to use them when you should, which is bad. (A lot of people seem to come to this idea through reading David Allen.) Your simplest tools should be fun. If I already know exactly what file I want to append a new note to, clicking through my filesystem until I get to it isn't fun, and is in fact rather tedious. You'll still catch SOME of your great ideas, even if you do have to go through some rigamarole to get them down... but not as many as you could be catching. It's the difference between fumbling through your backpack for an old takeout menu and simply pulling a notecard out of your back pocket.

Power up!

FMP is basically software-agnostic, but I like to use it with an OSX program called Quicksilver. If you make an "Append text..." trigger that points to your main notes file, FMP will let you add to any of your note collections using a single hotkey. Adding another book to your "find this at the library" queue, putting lentils on your shopping list, starting a new file for features you want in your next cellphone, collecting plot and character ideas for the five different stories you're working on... you can do it all by simply hitting one muscle-memory button combination, typing a line, and hitting return. It's fun. Feels kind of badass, actually.

Currently, I have four related triggers set up:

Cmd-opt-shift-F: Append line to fiend.txt.
Cmd-opt-shift-G: Open fiend.txt in TextEdit.
Cmd-opt-shift-R: Run fmp.rb.
Cmd-opt-shift-V: Open ~/Lists in the Finder.

More detail?

It's going to be easiest to explain this through examples. FMP dictates that you've got one file (~/Lists/fiend.txt, though that's easy enough to change) that, one way or another, catches your random notes. Say the last five lines you've appended to it look something like this:

If you're stressing out this weekend, make some cookies! Invite G&R, make it an event.
^buy Sichuan peppercorns
^seekmusic Neko Case - Fox Confessor Brings the Flood
Where is my Sleater-Kinney poster?
^seekbook some Steven Brust

Then you run fmp.rb, and that section of ~/Lists/fiend.txt looks like this:

If you're stressing out this weekend, make some cookies! Invite G&R, make it an event.
Where is my Sleater-Kinney poster?

In the meantime, the line:

Sichuan peppercorns

has been appended to ~/Lists/buy.txt.

Neko Case - Fox Confessor Brings the Flood

and

some Steven Brust

have gone into seekmusic.txt and seekbook.txt, respectively. If any of those files didn't exist before running the script, they do now.

Rules!

Well, rules and things to know.

Category/file names can't have any spaces in them, since we use a space to decide where the name ends and the actual note begins. For now, the only allowed characters for category names are letters, digits, ., -, and _. Honestly, though, you're going to be typing these names a lot, so you're going to be happier anyhow if they're all short, to-the-point, and alphabet-only.
Ruby wants nice and clean Unix newlines, and can jam your formatting together if it doesn't find 'em. When I first ran it, my seekbook and seekmusic files were old enough that they had lived on three different operating systems, and they ended up getting a little messy. If your lists have newline blues, run 'em through something like Josh Aas's LineBreak.app.
Speaking of which, it's pretty easy to import any preexisting lists into your FMP-managed notes system: Just move them into ~/Lists, give them filenames without any spaces in them, and start adding to them as per normal.
It's your call on how best to run fmp.rb, and on how often you need to do it. You could just call it from a command line whenever you need it, you could schedule it as a nightly cron job, you could make an Automator script that runs it and then copies everything in ~/Lists/ to your iPod's notes folder. Whatever works, man.
fmp.rb and the FMP note-taking system are being put out here under the GNU General Public License (GPL). Which is kind of overkill, since it's just a handful of carefully-chained regexps, but whatever.
fmp.rb is basically for unices, including Macintosh and Linux. I've got no idea how Ruby works on Windows, and I'm not inclined to do the legwork on figuring out whether fmp.rb works properly. Sorry! Do let me know how that works out.

Installation!

If you've any business running Ruby scripts and making append-triggers and stuff, you probably already know this, but just for good measure, here's how to get FMP running properly on your system. First, the "I know Unix" method:

Download the file at the top of the page.
If your Ruby executable is somewhere other than /usr/bin/ruby, make sure you change that shabang line so it's aimed properly.
Rename the file to "fmp" and move it to a directory that's included in your $PATH.
Make the file executable.

And now the "I don't know Unix" method:

Download the file at the top of the page, and save it in your home directory.
Open a new terminal window.

Type these lines, hitting enter after each one:

sudo cp fmp1.3.rb /usr/bin/fmp
sudo chmod 755 /usr/bin/fmp

You should now be able to run FMP by typing "fmp" at a command prompt.

Email?

Yeah, sure, email me! firstname.lastname@gmail.com. (Yeah, that's a Turing test. Sorry.)

FAQ

Are you the same Nick Fagerlund who wrote that version of Minesweeper with kitchy 3D graphics?

Surprisingly enough, that was actually some other part-Swede named after the patron saint of Russia. Yeah, I know.

You doin' anything after the show?

Naw. Wanna go get some drinks?