Use cases and Bike as OBTF

I am just curious in peoples use-cases for Bike as follow up on A few questions for Bike users. I am very tempted to go with Bike as OBTF (One Big Text File), especially now with the Focus Header feature. Does anyone else use Bike as OBTF or as a scratchpad for catch all?

1 Like

I personally prefer one big folder.

A single file somehow feels intuitively fragile – a single point of failure.

Standard tools, including XQuery and XSLT (with XInclude) can be used to traverse a folder-full of files.

I generally only have on big file that I keep around and save. With that said, I also tend to have a bunch of untitled “scratch” files around too. If I come up with anything savable in those scratch files that I’ll eventually move to big file.

1 Like

As I learn about the features for navigating though a single Bike document, I find myself piling everything into one big file (my “overall.bike”). However, I’m intrigued by @complexpoint’s observation about XML tools are geared to handling folders of files. It’s been years since I seriously worked with XSLT, but wanting to do more with Bike encourages me to brush off those skills. (At the moment though, I’m sticking with the Python lxml library.)

I keep one big file structured as a daily journal. I use it as a scratchpad, and if a node gets a little too large I will break it out into its own file, and link to it in my journal.

in Bike?

Yep. I modified the today script from the Bike guide, and changed each day’s label format to date +'%a, %B %e, %Y' so I can do fuzzy searches for dates like Sun Sep 24.

3 Likes

I am very much considering this to move my project file from Taskpaper to Bike.

However, when it comes to bridging the gap between macOS and iOS, I am at a crossroads.

Currently, I use Drafts to run an action on my taskpaper file that extracts due soon tasks and exports them as markdown into a daily note in Craft, combined with stuff from other apps. This works wonderfully both on iOS and macOS as a long-ass Apple Shortcut.

Since Bike files appear to be HTML, I am wondering if the same logic could be applied to them. Something I need to test out for the future.

However, what I would really like is to use Bike as both a project-note, daily-note and task prioritisation tool, because I get tired of using multiple apps. Maybe once we get filtering :slightly_smiling_face:

1 Like

@Gorgonzola Fascinating to see your mention of the applications you’re using: Taskpaper, Drafts, and Craft and how you’re contemplating centralizing lots of functionality on Bike. In my case, I’m focused on Bike and Obsidian interoperability at the moment – how to fluidly move between Bike outlines and Obsidian flavored markdown.

Yes, it’s a trainwreck. I didn’t even mention Bear and Obsidian :joy: I tend to go with whatever feels best for certain type of work then rely heavily on automation to bring it all together. Bike really has potential to replace most of these apps for me.

2 Likes

Cheers to everyone for taking time and responding to the post. I currently use Workflowy as OBTF, and have been doing so for around 10 years. But local files is good and the text animation and smoothness of Bike just makes it so good to use.

I have taken inspiration from @bluetoothspliff and made a modified shortcut action and activate it using Raycast. I use this only for my today.bike which is a daily log/journal.

After using Raycast for some time, I have found that combining Raycast and Bike actually works very well for navigating / finding what I need. But for now, my best workflow is in Workflowy, but definitely will keep experimenting with Raycast and Bike to build a sound workflow. More complex projects I’ve found work well in Bike as one large document, using focus headings to jump around the project.

1 Like