If you’re anything like me, you write a lot of lists. I use lists for pretty much everything — note taking, planning my day, managing projects, shopping, organization, etc etc etc. I have lists of lists. It’s a bit out of control. Over the years, I’ve coalesced on a simple, basic format, where I write things using indented (tabbed) lists of plain text (in TextMate). I kept finding myself converting some of these lists to HTML, so I’ve written something up that will take a plain text list and reformat it as HTML, given a simple set of formatting rules.

That project is available for download now, under the name ListML. Check it out, I use it all the time, so will probably continue developing it. At the moment it’s just a simple script that you drop into a directory, then drop other TXT files in there to view them as HTML. We’ll see where it ends up. If you’ve got any suggestions or find any bugs, feel free to post them as a comment here and I’ll fix things up. I already have some ideas on new features:

• Ability to load external files (from URL)
• List files in the current directory if none specified
• Cut out the parsing engine properly to make it more portable
• Make the HTML view (optionally) into a lightweight editor as well
• Quick UI for grabbing the HTML snippet of just the list (sans CSS/extras)