Ask HN: How do you manage your plain text notes | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you manage your plain text notes

18 pointsgofreddygo10 comments

I have notes scattered around in my notebook, email, git, personal wikis and some files across 5 devices (2 of which I do not own).

I am consolidating them all in plain text. I tag each text file with topic, date and context keywords. I use grep and awk to create "views" into them. Works great.

What does not work great is on the phone (which is where I need it the most for reading and cross references)

I do not want to get locked into proprietary formats or platforms. This is just plain text.

What are my options ?

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> I tag each text file with topic, date and context keywords.

Nice idea. How are you doing that? Also, do you version control your notes?

> What does not work great is on the phone

I maintain an open source project called Dnote (https://github.com/dnote/dnote) which solves this problem for you. It's basically a command line notebook using SQLite + a mobile friendly web interface to which you can sync your notes.

Agree with you that we should avoid being locked into a proprietary formats or platforms. Businesses and platforms come and go, but our notes should stay as readily accessible as possible.

Dnote looks interesting. I don't quite get how it addresses searching and listing notes on the phone.

I add "topic:...", "date:..." and "keyword:" lines in each file, grep through the files to list all topics or sort by topic and group notes by topic/keyword. I also keep the date I started the note in the filename itself.

I just need a good way to search through them on my phone.

Adding lines such as "topic:..." sounds like a very useful and low key solution. I might start trying that. Thanks.

You can use Dnote web app on the phone to do full text search and list notes by book. You can also install the website as a progressive web app for usability.

On the downside, using this web interface subjects users to a third party system (albeit open source) and forces them to give up the autonomy that they enjoy by simply using plaintext files.

That's nice, but it would be awesome to be able to synchronize plain text files using rclone/syncthing - without using dedicated server.

Thanks for the compliment. It is possible to use any other methods to synchronize notes because Dnote stores everything in a single SQLite file. The dedicated server becomes useful for providing a web interface and API access to the notes.

I don't do notes on my phone. I manage all my notes with zim-wiki. It's cross platform and portable on Windows so no installation. Plain text and folders for organisation, search is fast. Has tagging and dating built-in.

For me, it depends on what the note is for. I store all my personal notes in Apple Notes. When I am at work and I need to store personal notes, I use my Google Keep that I will move to Apple Notes when I get home (Apple iCloud is blocked at work but not google ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ). At work, I store all my notes in OneNote. OneNote is by far the best note taking tool I have ever used. I wish the Mac version was better. On my Kali box, I use Cherrynotes. I only use it for HackTheBox. If Microsoft would have a good linux and Mac version, I would use it instead of the others.

I need a single source of truth for my notes. Having them scattered all over the place does not work for me.

If you use emacs then org-mode is a natural suggestion.

Personally I have two git repositories that store org-mode files; one for a work-journal, and one for personal files ("DIARY.org", "BIRTHDAYS.org", "REFERENCE.org", etc).

Random reminders/ad-hoc tasks I use google's todo-list, because it is easy to work with on a mobile. I just have a couple of tasks "things to buy" with subtasks for things I need to remember (e.g. "buy bleach") and a couple of scheduled tasks "change toothbrush", "clean windows".

Upload them to a git repo and download GitJournal, it can sync from/to git

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