Marco Stolpe
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Posts: 2
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Hi! It's funny that this topic is one of the more recent ones, since I had exactly the same question myself today: Should I keep everything in a single tbx file or in separate ones?
Actually, I had ordered the tutorials yesterday and only thereby realized that one can also link to tbx files and that it could also be nice to have some smaller files rather than a single big one.
What I have experienced so far is that with a single big file, almost everything somehow ends up by becoming a container. At least for me, that's often the most easiest and fastest way to associate information with each other. However, such containers lead to three problems for me:
1) The hierarchy of containers can easily become very deep, and I'm often getting entirely lost in the outline or also map view.
2) Since it is not possible to change the shape of a container in the current version of Tinderbox, at least as far as I know, I lose a useful way to distinguish between different types of information. For example, in the tutorials, persons are sometimes represented by certain types of shapes and I like that very much. Now if I want to add some further information about that person, I'd usually attach it one level below in the outline view, making the person a container. But then the shape is lost!
3) I often need different and specially arranged views for different types of information. When opening some examples and demos on the tutorials CD, I liked it very much that such views - like, for instance, ReadMe files - are automatically opened together with the file. That's another reason why I'm thinking about separate files.
But of course, the disadvantage of using separate files is the missing search functionality and the ability to use agents across different topics. For example, when I'm at that aforementioned person, an idea for a todo related to that person might occur to me. I'd like to attach it directly to the person and let an agent gather all my todos instead of having to enter the todo manually in a separate tbx file.
However, I don't know any solution for this dilemma, apart from implementing a search engine and agents that can also search across tbx documents.
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