Ask HN: What is your strategy for organizing your files or notes? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is your strategy for organizing your files or notes?

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How do you organize your directories, files, notes, etc.? For example, how do you use Mac tags (colors) to label your files?

If a method of organization has improved your efficiency, please share with us!

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I'm taking notes for more than 10 years and have a rather big collection. I have tried many apps but after losing data due to proprietary formats I won't use anything else then plain text anymore. Nowadays I write everything down as Markdown files that I have stored on my local disk in hierarchical folders (backed up by Spideroak).

The only part I wasn't happy with was search. So I have built my own local search engine. It treats the first line of a Markdown file as a line of tags that I can search for. It takes advantages of Markdown syntax (e.g. words in headlines get a scoring boost) and it can also open files in my editor, integrating quite well in my daily work flow.

It's on Github if interested: https://github.com/BernhardWenzel/markdown-search

OneNote for niche knowledge on different concepts. Handwritten notes for follow ups at work and general concepts or self improvement (two notebooks).

I find the searchability of OneNote good for hunting down that one thing I saw when I fucked up the setup of something. I prefer handwritten notes for expressing thoughts and stream of consciousness.

I like to structure my computer so directories are either full of directories or files, but never both. It cuts down on directories named "misc" and makes for a relatively easy burrow to something relevant

File System: Keep it relatively flat. There's a global folder like Audio then sub folders like Music, Audio Books, etc. then the files or a grouping folder for many of the same files like songs of an album. I try not to go deeper than that

Notes: VimWiki. I prefer all my thoughts in plain text, I love OneNote and Evernote but can't stand the thought of loosing my years worth of notes to propriety software. My wiki is structured the same as my file system, with as few directories as possible.

Evernote + it's search is my strategy. I write down everything in a note and search for it later.

Google Drive for files, Evernote for notes.

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