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Comment by nickjj | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone else use plain text notes for everything?

I've tried to optimize things so that while working, I can get things jotted down with close to zero resistance. If the barrier of entry is too high then I don't bother doing it.

That means often being able to spawn a new terminal, write a command and be done with it. Or to be able to pipe something from my clipboard into an auto-dated file.

I ended up putting together this ~15 line Bash script which seems to do the trick: https://github.com/nickjj/notes

I've been using plain text notes since 2001, although I only recently created this script. So far so good.

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I'm experimenting with a single 500K+ line-long flat text file for EVERYTHING, from dream journalling to work email drafts to blog posts etc. -- I've even copied math from my home whiteboard in latex -- screw rendering, I'll transcribe them back when I need them.

At one point I was trying to do a Luhmann's Zettelkasten with one note per txt file, internal linking, etc. I concatenated every piece of txt content I had. It's much simpler.

I have no system anymore. I try to create internal "hashtags" that are ctrl-F searchable. The goal is having something that's always open and at hand. I got plugins for autosaving when the window loses focus, autoloading when changed in disk and it syncs to Dropbox.

I cobbled together in Notepad++ (which has a GUI for this) a small syntax coloring definition that sort of matches my spontaneous habits from old salvaged text. I intend to let this evolve too. E.g. I'm using {braces} to have a little collapse button that hides pieces of text.

I came to the same conclusion: a massive flat text file in emacs. I was using orgmode for a bit, but it was too convoluted. I have a very simple markup to identify TODO items with [ ], and I nest contiguous items with { }, making it easy to navigate chunks with emacs. I then have 3 keyboard macros to mark/unmark and move the TODO items into a DONE section. It's simple enough I can recreate the system from scratch in a few minutes when I'm at a new terminal.

I use the same method for years: big single .txt file, with hashtags that are CTRL+F searchable, exactly the same!

Among all the organization/notetaking methods I've tried, this is really the best. No fancy app in the browser, but really effective and fast.

I've written a small article about it here:

https://illdoitlater.xyz/t/plaintext

> Cons: no sync with a mobile device

How do you access your notes on your phone? How do you edit?

What about using syncthing? There are decent text editors for mobile.

Tangentially related, but after years of trying out (and struggling with) hundreds of calendar and schedule apps, in the end what was best for me turned out to be a simple text file that I keep updating and look at each day. A line on it represents a day and begins with (dd/mm), and events for the day are plaintext separated by commas. Each day gone by gets erased. Absolutely zero friction and I can see an entire month of stuff at a glance so I'm always aware of what to do. Can't believe it took me so long to go back to such bare basics, and now I strive to reach this level of brutal basic frictionless simplicity in my own toy projects.

Brutal basic frictionless simplicity is a good way to put it haha.

That's basically what this script does except it uses separate files. You run `notes something really cool and important` and it creates a YYYY-MM-DD.txt file for you in a configured directory and appends the arguments to the file on a new line. So every day you get a new file.

Or, if you just run `notes` it opens your configured $EDITOR for that specific day so you can go free form.

This is how I use Sublime Text cause I dont have to actually save new files it saves them for me. It loads instantly so its perfect. I paste in code snippets and what have you.

I dont use ST3 for proper dev as much cause I use JetBrains IDEs more.

I still would prefer something better for my more permanent notes.

Yep, zero resistance: plaintext, with context, metadata, keywords, minimal formatting, grep and a few scripts. The most important thing to remember is that I don't remember everything, so write it down, and use sensible filenames/hierarchy/tags/metadata so it can be found easily.

The less temptation to play with CSS, formatting and markup the better. One day it'll all go in a self-contained minimal wiki. Maybe.

On my android phone I use an ancient app called "unote" (installed from an .apk which I keep, it's long since disappeared from Play). Simple, hierarchical plaintext notes, kept in a local sqlite file. Sadly no search, but that just means I have to be disciplined about what, where and pruning.

I use emacs org mode which stores every thing in a text file.The text file is fully human readable even without emacs. Its has few rules that makes the collapsing the parts of the text file. One of the main rule is any line that starts with asterik followed by space ("* ") is interpreted as heading and the whole heading can be collapsed.

Yes; I've been using Notational Velocity for years. It gives just enough automatic structure (it's almost like a box filled with index cards, though the size of the note is unlimited) without having to actually fiddle with files. It's effortless to create new entries and incredibly easy to find things again later.

I started with something very similar but it got a bit fat and it's now ~60 lines of Bash :)

https://github.com/panos-zamos/zlog-cli#lt

I use orgmode and emacs for everything plain text!

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