Merging Text Files

Because I’m taking a lot of “artsy” courses this year, I’m actually spending quite a bit of time to actually take proper notes when I do my readings.  When I used my Mac, this was a relatively simple task; I’d simply fired up DevonThink and just hammer away.

Now that I’ve switched over to Windows again,  I still find myself using the DevonThink-way of taking notes.  I’ll make a new folder for each chapter, and inside each chapter I’ll have a txt file of notes for each subsection in the chapter. It makes a lot more sense to me and it makes it easier to break down the material into something that’s a lot more manageable.

This method makes it easier to study the material chapter-by-chapter, but its not so useful when you’re trying to search between documents.  DevonThink had a really nice feature where you could search within your notes database, and it would even try to look for documents which talked about “similar” topics.

Now there’s no way that I could’ve written something similar in the 12 hours that I had left, so I settled for something much simpler.

I wrote a quick Python script to take a bunch of folders as an argument, and then for each folder it would merge all the txt files that it finds and saves it in a new txt file in the folder above the target.

It sounds confusing but it worked quite well when you need to cram!