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Comment by rasengan0 | Hacker News Reader

After many years of trying everything, a few conclusions have greatly helped: only PLAIN TEXT, cross platform and date stamp every line item (add to your dotvimrc or dotemacs or js bookmarklet)

mindmappers? - bought and tried them all cloud subscription notetakers - yep pretty much all

Best to have data close at hand - Oh nooos, everything is locked in that proprietary app I bought in the 90's or cloud service I threw 3 yrs in.

After years with orgmode and vimwiki, I went back to Firefox http://tiddlywiki.com/ + vim as editor with https://github.com/docwhat/itsalltext/

if you live in emacs then stay in orgmode or deft.el for speed if vim, vimwiki

rsync is my friend

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I agree. I've been keeping work/life journals using various systems and inevitably either the tool would become unsupported, my data would get corrupted, or the 'friction' of opening the application would eventually make me stop keeping track of things.

What really worked well for me instead has been to us Notational Velocity (nvALT to be specific). I create a new note for every day (titled YYYY-MM-DD), and especially for work notes I add a timestamp for every new entry for that day (ISO 8601).

The result is one folder full of text files that I can quickly update and search through using nvALT. I can use the same app for storing all kinds of other things, but I can also use any other text editing tool for my notes as well (grep, WriteRoom, Sublime Text with markdown plugins, etc.).

Currently I moved my 'journalling' into a locally running web tool, but because the source data is just text, 'migration' has been trivial. It's quite possible I'll move back to the plain text + nvALT solution though. I usually do. I just can't help tinkering.

I actually went back to paper, a good quality notebook with squared paper (to turn into checkboxes). People who want to explain stuff to me can scribble things on the next page, I can draw outlines of UIs, and doing something away from the computer screen helps me focus.

Tiddlywiki only needs a better UX/UI to be a killer app. Evernote with a scripting and plain text approach would be a killer app also..

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