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I'm transitioning to plain text files as the basis for my GTD system, which is awesome when I'm at my laptop (Vim editing all the way).

However, I haven't yet figured out a good way to take quick notes on my Android tablet, which is a Xoom running Honeycomb (not yet rooted, although I'm open to the idea).

Ideally what I like is a script or widget that would pop up a textbox that I could type a note into. The note would then be saved and synced to Dropbox automatically.

The idea is for this capture process to be as seamless as possible. I would like to avoid having to remember to manually sync files in the Dropbox app, or launch an app and fuss with naming a file, browsing to the correct directory, etc. The apps I've tried so far are much too fiddly for my tastes.

Any suggestions for how I could accomplish this? I'm a developer, I could definitely tackle a more code-oriented solution if that's the only way.

Matthew Read
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Josh Earl
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I use an app called Epistle to create/edit textfiles within my Dropbox repository. It even supports Markdown.

There are other similar apps in the Market. If you've embraced todo.txt for your to-do management, Gina Trapani's Todo.txt Touch is helpful. It also syncs to Dropbox.

ale
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  • Another vote for Epistle. The sync stopped working a few days ago though. Before that it was great when used with something like nvALT which is the OSX equivalent. It was awesome to keep my notes synced wherever I was. – kingkool68 Dec 03 '11 at 17:11
  • I am trying out Epistle, and it's pretty sweet. The only thing I'd like to see is the ability to pin a specific note to my home screen. Thanks for the suggestion! – Josh Earl Dec 04 '11 at 16:59
  • The Epistle app no longer exists, apparently – R.D. Alkire Dec 14 '23 at 13:56
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I'd recommend a combination of a text editor - either one of the market ones or vim from busybox (requires root) and dropsync which is a full dropbox client (unlike their own client, it syncs both ways). This would be pretty much the same setup as on the laptop, zero learning curve :)

Andrey Losev
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  • Great options. This would be pretty close to what I was envisioning. – Josh Earl Dec 04 '11 at 16:58
  • For those who want to stick with vim (or an editor of their choice), this solution works great with either VimTouch or a BusyBox-style command line vim editor. Awesome. – Dan Fitch Apr 28 '14 at 18:35
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Denote is an app I wrote that syncs text files to and from Dropbox and also offers a Markdown preview (useful to a lot of GTDers).

Re: The pinning a note to the home screen feature. Would the widget you are typing into on the home page represent a specific text file?

ThePaul
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Um, I don't know how helpful this will be to you but I recently bought an app called Ultimate To Do list which is GTD-based and captures notes on the 1st screen. What's neat is that it automatically syncs to ToodleDo which can be opened from any browser (and thus any device). There's no fuss with syncing. I don't mean to tout an app, but Ultimate To Do is actually one of the only apps I actually shelled out money for. There's a free version where all the features are unlocked for a trial period so you can try it out and see if it meets your needs.