Published 29 Jan 2020
As I've noted in another recent blog post, Notenik uses its own unique file format. However, since Notenik is rather late to the game of managing text files, and since those already using similar sorts of files are probably among those interested in my app, I wanted to talk a bit about how the latest version of Notenik can be used with existing folders full of text files. The information provided below includes a number of updates made starting with version 2.6.0 and continuing through 2.9.0.
First, philosophically, Notenik tries to follow Postel's Law:
Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.
Unfortunately, it is not possible for Notenik to be endlessly liberal in this regard, and there are certainly loosely formatted text files that may not be interpreted by Notenik according to the author's wishes.
With that being said, here are some rules that Notenik will try to apply to interpret existing text files in the best possible manner. (Many or even most of these rules involve recognition of the start of the note's body, even though the note lacks the explicit ‘Body:’ field label found in the standard Notenik format.)
When a note is updated, Notenik will generally try to respect each file's existing format, rather than rewriting the note using Notenik's format.
New notes will be written out using Notenik's file format.
If you wish to convert an existing collection of files so that they all are consistently formatted using the standard Notenik format, then the best way to do this is to open your existing folder, review it to make sure that all or most of the data is being interpreted favorably, and then use the Export command beneath the File menu to export the collection into the Notenik format. This will create a new folder containing all of your notes, formatted in the Notenik format.
Notenik is open-source software released under the terms of the MIT license. I mention this only to emphasize the point that, although I've done everything I can think of to enable Notenik to be used with existing folders full of text files, the software is provided “As Is”, without warranty of any kind. If you have problems, I'd like to know about them, so I can hopefully further improve the software. But you should be careful to back up your existing data before using it with Notenik (and during, of course).
If you run into any problems with any of this, or have any suggestions for further improvements, please feel free to email me at support at notenik.net and I'll see what I can do to help.