Using Drafts

Saturday, 30 May, 2020 — writing creativity

I was turned on to Drafts listing to the Back to Work podcast with Merlin Mann and Dan Benjamin, back when Drafts 4 was current and before there was a Mac client. If I recall correctly, Merlin was talking on the fact that Drafts was a good dumping ground for random bits of text that he could then decide what to do with.

It took me a bit to really grasp the promise.

Ordinarily, I work with BBEdit and Vim when I’m at my computer. Both are great for handling established lists, text manipulation, editing and so forth. But now, most things I write on the iPad, iPhone, and a fair amount of what I write on my desktop starts in Drafts.

BBEdit has some provision for temporary text in the form of its Scratchpad, something I use frequently. There’s a global Scratchpad and one available for each BBEdit project. I set-up a different BBEdit project for each codebase I use. Actively, I have snippets of text in two or three different scratchpads.

What’s harder, though, is starting a new document in one of these programs, because, pretty quickly, in wanting to save this text to disk, there’s a decision about what to call the thing I’m writing. Surprisingly, there’s some friction there, because besides giving the piece of writing a name, there’s the aspect of where it goes.

For ephemera, I don’t need the text I write to end up in a permanent file. I do need the text to appear across my devices and be easy to locate. Drafts does just that.

If and when I am ready to save an entry to a file, Drafts gives me that option. It’s plain-text. It supports Markdown. It syncs nearly instantly and it gets out of the way. Drafts also has Workspaces functionality, and wow, is it nice.

The iPad, an external keyboard, and Drafts, is a pretty idealized writing environment. It’s full-screen, (mostly) distraction free, when I let it be.

Here are the tasks I use Drafts for:

• Building up shopping lists
• Creating workout plans
  • This was more of a thing before gestures broadly all of this
• Drafting tweets
• Saving URLs for link posts
• Writing blog entry drafts
• Taking notes for work meetings
• Writing most anything I haven’t figured out any particular structure to just yet
• Composing emails, Slack messages, or anything i might paste into a web-based textarea
  • I find dedicated text editors drop words, letters, punctuation or flat out lose everything much less often than webforms textareas do
  • As with drafting tweets, there’s an added benefit in that composing offline means fewer opportunities for a hasty autocorrect or dropped error
  • On Slack, I avoid “Nathan is typing…” for minutes while I gather my thoughts, I’ve already done it once I send something

Once I’m done with the above, Drafts gives me several options of how to act on what I’ve just written:

• Preview Markdown text as lightly-styled HTML
• Save an entry as a text file
• Send a tweet directly from Drafts, which is nice when I don’t want to open the hellsite directly
• Send a tweet thread
  • The hack here is by writing in terms of a tweet thread, I will veer into just writing. At that point, I’m working on a blog entry and, as a goal, I would strongly prefer to publish more here than on Twitter.
• Archive or delete the entry once I’m done with it, particularly ephemeral lists

It’s a valuable tool.