FoldingText 3 Announced

FoldingText is quite the impressive text editor. It was started by the same folks behind TaskPaper and was spun out as a more powerful text editor with task management features.

A post in the support forum is now talking about the future of this unique beast. 2018 might just be the year when plain text lovers have a variety of new apps to try. It’s finally the year of Notational Velocity alternatives.

We believe FoldingText is far too powerful and expressive to be kept as a single document editor. FoldingText 3 will be a database backed application that allows you to take quick notes, and keep all FoldingText notes consolidated. FoldingText 3 will offer full text search for the database, and importing your existing documents will be trivial.

There’s also a move to subscription billing (or annual upgrade purchasing). This is a trend I don’t love but it’s also one I can’t hold out against.

FoldingText 3 will also not be a free upgrade. The only way to ensure development can continue with FoldingText will be to have some sort of perpetual payment model. I’m afraid we’ve still to decide the specifics, but we believe that FoldingText can only thrive when customers support the development effort.

The Archive came out earlier this year and it’s already a compelling reason to move back to the old single-folder model of text notes. I’m still not sure exactly how FoldingText 3 will implement the database but I’m hopeful it will still involve a folder of text files.

Then there’s this little sentence that seems like it should be it’s own headline:

FoldingText 3 is also written in electron, so we aim to work on a windows version after the release of the Mac version.

Multi-platform support is one of the reasons I love Sublime Text. I’d be very happy with FoldingText on both the Mac and Windows.