Comment by Confiks | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Confiks | Hacker News Reader

I use 2Do with a keyboard shortcut for a new task set to Ctrl+Alt+Cmd+T, so I can instantly note anything down and forget about it. That lands into an inbox I can process later.

If it's an actionable thing I then categorize and schedule it, but I also have a large 'Maybe' list for unwieldy project ideas (52 items and counting).

For random daily or project notes I use a small shell script (and Dock application, via Automator) that creates a daily file and opens the containing folder in an editor:

    touch "~/notes/$(date +%Y%m%d).txt"
    $EDITOR ~/notes 1>&2 2>/dev/null &

On my phone I use a very simple but therefore fast and effective open source notes application: https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/diary.git. I never write much there, so I just sometimes manually copy it to my other notes.

I do something like your touch incantation, but as a bash function (mknote) that takes an argument for a basic "name".

So whenever I make a note, it goes to ~/notes/$date-$1.txt which I then come back to later either manually or with "enote" (which opens emacs for the latest note matching $1 via ls -t). Having the name really helps me see visually what I'm looking for, roughly remember (like any title) what important enough things happened in the last while, and so on.

As for daily notes/TODO, I've long given up on a single TODO.txt, but do have several years of weekly status entries in the "Google snippets" form of "this week, next week". For 2018, I finally gave in and switched to Markdown rather than my own sort of format ("dash means done as planned, X means didn't do it, + means something unplanned happened").

Edit: phone typos.

2Do sounds like exactly the kind of thing I would use.

Apps like these tempt me to buy a MacBook.

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