Comment by mekoka | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mekoka | Hacker News Reader

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Writing is not publishing. If you conflate the two you might not write at all. Having a place to write is as free and easy as:

  mkdir ~/thoughts

Now, after you've replied your quick counterpoints to someone on HN, whip out the text editor and

  vim ~/thoughts/why-writing-is-not-free-nor-easy

Go and expand on your thoughts on the subject there. It doesn't have to be prosaic, some simple bullet points that encapsulate the main ideas are enough. You can revisit later for an in-depth or progressive analysis. Do that even if you didn't actually reply to anyone, but felt merely like jotting down notes about your take on the matter. Write your own thoughts on stuff that people share in real life, on HN, youtube, facebook, etc. Observe a curious phenomenon and write a single line about it in a file. It's easier than Twitter. With the latter you worry about presentation, whereas the former lets you capture the main thoughts quickly, without worrying about form.

You don't have to publish. It's just writing, it's for you first and foremost. Over the years revisit, refine, and expand on your thoughts. Write articles over the course of 10 years. See how clever or ignorant you were 5 years ago. Allow yourself to laugh at your own jokes or to delete some posts in embarrassment. Let your mind be changed as it's meant to, safe from judgment. Some day you may feel wise enough and ready to share some selected pieces that have remained constant all throughout.

I do something similar but with a bit more ceremony. I use a gitbook and keep committing every week or so. Instead of text I use markdown instead of plain text which makes it more readable in my text editor (VSCode). Not able to write too much these days due to wrist pain (possibly due to CTS) but this has been a effective way for last 3 years. I have around 500 files now.

What still astounds me after 2 months of researching this space is that every day I learn about a new way people store what they write. The other day, I was talking with someone about how he stores what he writes in an Excel file. It's like Abraham Maslow said "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail".

Once upon a time, even before the world wide web, darkness covered the land and me but a fledgling was tasked with editing my boss’s business letters. As VP of engineering he was a man of letters. Many letters. Templated letters for my boss was organized in the ways old managing engineers oft are.

Lotus 123 he wielded for engineering calculations and thus Lotus 123 was his weapon for business letters. No spell check of course. No line breaks either. Such was my editorial lot.

Please keep off the grass.

I had a civil engineering coworker send me a flowchart in Excel. I was somewhat impressed.

Jim Harbaugh, a very successful football coach, uses excel for everything.

https://floqast.com/blog/jim-harbaugh-microsoft-excel-fanati... and a funny interview about it https://twitter.com/barstoolbigcat/status/115845032170801561...

Jim Harbaugh advises his quarterbacks not to eat chicken as it is a 'nervous bird,' and is 0-5 vs. OSU. Excel might be the most reasonable thing he does.

What about WordStar on DOS?

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27407502

What I'm trying to say is: it doesn't matter what the tool is. If the process / outcome are worth it, then starting to write is much more valuable than the exact tool (that you choose to get the cool kids nodding their heads in agreement). Productivity is cool.

I don't get it. There seems to be a sentiment in these comments that older → ill-suited; ill-suited being the actual reason why the anecdote about Excel is noteworthy. WordStar on DOS is a word processor. It's old and uncool, sure, but it's not ill-suited for the task in the way that Excel is.

Someone below mentions that Excel is probably an "upgrade" from a typewriter. What. Sure, Excel has undo and arbitrary text insertion, but so does Photoshop. Ask yourself if Photoshop would be an upgrade from a typewriter just because it's newer. At some point, the impedance mismatch wrt the actual task it was conceived for is so great that it will dominate any equation related to suitability for a particular purpose. So even the most recent version of Excel is still more ill-suited for writing than things actually made for writing, like typewriters and old word processors.

I think Excel can be considered an upgrade on the physical typewriter. Yet, some people still write books with those. Whatever gets you there.

Excel is great when you have a lot of small notes you need to reference and you need a quick and easy way to structure them. Write in an editor and then paste in Excel.

I use a AHK(Autohotkey) script which pops up a single input text, and saves my input in a textfile (or a html file) which resides in my Dropbox folder.

Ok

That seems unnecessarily contemptuous. Presumably they had some reason to use Excel? If they had Excel, they most certainly were aware of Word...

it is not about hammer and nail, but about infinite plane. You can wrote in one column, like in Word document, then expand on side if content needs it. Second thing is use of images, shapes, arrows, lines, circles - sometimes image is better in conducting thought than words. About plane, if you start with some thinking and it branches out, in excel there is no problem.

My note-taking app is basically this script:

  read text
  echo -e "\n$text" >> ~/Dropbox/writing/notes/stream.txt

I actually wrote my last article this way, paragraph by paragraph. For those who suffer from edit/analysis paralysis (such as myself) a tool that does not allow you to edit (or even see) your previous sentences really help focus on making progress.

I just use M-x doctor

Ah, yes, the doctor :) Do you know if it records the sessions somewhere?

Since doctor is in buffer, C-x C-w should work.

I Agree, failing to acknowledge the difference between them will make you worry about publish quality when you should be writing raw.

how would you even begin organizing all your thoughts?

RoamResearch's approach seems promising: most thoughts are organized by date, plus a bunch of tools that make search easier.

Trying to invent a hierarchy for unorganized thoughts is certainly a waste of effort.

unfortunately, it looks like Roam is a proprietary format rather than plain text

Write them down.

Then try to surface the topology using whatever tools you like.

Directories. Sections inside text files.

grep

zettelkasten

data:text/html, <html contenteditable>

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