Set default format to text

Is there a setting to default to text (.txt) for Bike? Doesn’t need to be in the menu, I can set it from the terminal. This will save me a step. Don’t use HTML format much, and keep forgetting to save as text.

I know that TextEdit provides an option for default document format. I’m sure other’s exists… can anyone point me to other apps that allow for changing default document format? Just wondering how common this is and what UI’s people use.

iA Writer
Change the default extension in Preferences > General > Enter Default Extension. (.txt, .md, .mkd, .mdown, and .markdown)

TextEdit
You can make sure TextEdit saves files in Unicode (UTF-8) by going to TextEdit > Preferences… > Open and Save, select Save As setting is Unicode (UTF-8) and check: Add “.txt” to plain text files"

TheArchive
Preferences > Advanced > Enter Plain Text File Extensions: .txt, .md, taskpaper, .md, .mkd, .mdown, and .markdown, etc

Notebooks 2
Preferences > Edit > Default Document Type: pick from list: Formatted Document, Text, Markdown

Thanks for adding Default [File] Type in Preferences.

I use TheArchive as my note taking database with Bike as my outlining app. Keeping everything in text format allows me to integrate the two programs. I setup Bike as one of TheArchives’s specified external editors. A Keyboard Maestro macro makes it easy to open up Bike from TheArchive.

There has been some comments on the links not looking pretty, but they work. For wiki-style links using [[my-wik-style-link]] I use TheArchive app. I keep my Bike outlines as text files and store them in the directory with TheArchive notes. I use TheArchives to link notes and bike outlines with wik-style ilinks. PopClip has an extension to add [ ] to selected text. I sometimes use PopClip to create the wik-style link.

I use Alfred4 snippet to create a unique ID based on YYYYMMDDHH, 12-digits, for example 202206221957. I add the UID to the name of the Bike outline, which is also the filename. My links to the Bike outline would be something like this: Title_BlahBlahBlah: [[202206221957]]. I change the Title names often, but never change the UID. ( For, those who are interested, the Alfred Snippet is {date:yyyyMMddHHmm} )

I know that Bike is moving toward rich text format, RTF. But, I appreciate the developer’s support of text files. Processing information as text streams is essential to my workflow. Again, thanks for adding the default file type txt to preferences. Go Bike! Go text!

I know that Bike is moving toward rich text format, RTF.

Possibly a slight misunderstanding ?

Bike’s native format is an HTML outline, in which the text of each row is encoded by an html p tag.

I think the intention is to take advantage of some of the « rich text » inline formatting (bold, italic tags etc) supported within HTML paragraph tags.

In other words, not the RTF file format (which TextEdit, for example, makes use of), and very much accessible to all the standard open source tools for processing and querying HTML and XML.

1 Like

Thanks for the clarification.

1 Like