I’m really enjoying using Bike and am increasingly moving more and more of my operational stuff (todos, notes etc) into Bike documents.
At the moment I have one “main” document with links that open the other documents.
This works, but I cant help wonder if I’d be better off just moving everything into one much bigger document.
I was wondering how other people are using Bike? Is there a recommended approach? Is the “right way to hold it” to be creating larger, all encompassing documents as opposed to lots of interconnected smaller documents?
Ha, and my case is the opposite. I have stuff scattered everywhere. Often I use Bike for random brainstorming … and then unorganized remembering of a brainstorm, and then finally scattered files. I do have a few files, such as Bike todo that are longer term and “a bit” more organized.
but also, each morning a hot-keyed script can give me a fresh file in the pattern of notes2026-05-16.bike (FWIW a pair of adjacent keys can move me a day at a time backwards or forwards through my existing notes, including pre-creating files for days to come).
For very quick searches across all the files in my Day Notes folder, I point ‘The Archive.app’ at the folder.
Reports across that folder (from simple to filtered, sorted, formatted in various ways), I specify in XQuery from the BasexGUI (free but Java-based, and tastes may vary, but there are other ways on macOS to use XQuery)
For a simple listing of files containing the word “diagram”, each followed by a tab and the matching row text, you might start with something like:
Expand disclosure triangle to view XQuery source
declare option output:method "text";
declare option output:item-separator " ";
declare variable $folder-path external;
declare variable $search-string external;
let $bike-files := file:list($folder-path, false(), '*.bike')
for $filename in $bike-files
let $filepath := $folder-path || $filename
let $doc := html:parse(file:read-text($filepath))
for $match in $doc//*:li/*:p[contains(lower-case(.), lower-case($search-string))]
(: order by $filename descending :)
return $filename || "	" || normalize-space(data($match))
One large file per area: Personal, Work 1, and Work 2.
Since jumping to a specific heading inside a long file is very easy and fast, I find it unnecessary to keep multiple separate files for the same area. I also create backups for each file regularly.
Occasionally, I create temporary files for processing, but these are deleted afterward.
something that i miss from an ancient version of Microsoft Word was their Work menu, which held a persistent list of user-added files. I used the Work menu to keep files like my CV and various documents that i occasionally worked on. The benefit over an Open Recent submenu is the persistence. i only seldomly opened my CV, which means that when I did open it, there was friction. A Work menu would also keep me from forgetting about files if i eventually do go for a Multiple documents model (my bike file contains 635,903 words).
I keep trying to use one main file, but I end up with lots of individual files as I start something that is “just temporary” and then becomes not temporary, haha.
I’ve started using bike more than textEdit as a notepad because it’s just so much easier to keep things organized.
