My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file (2020)
jeffhuang.com
jeffhuang.com
It’s the ritual. Any productivity system can be made to work once it becomes a habit and therefore your default action.
I think .txt files or Org mode are attractive to devs because they feel like something we’d be doing anyway during our day. the same system will work with a paper journal or even a fresh piece of paper every morning if, and only if, it can be integrated into your natural daily workflow as an automatic habit. I personally found that paper is better for me because I get to it before unlocking my computer and being confronted with work and communications and notifications that compete with it. However, I have a lot of peers who couldn’t hang on to a paper journal or TODO list during the day if they tried, so digital formats win.
The real key is to make it a habit and learn to stick with it.
My favorite system for knowledge management is Google Docs(due to obvious advantages- online drive, WYSIWYG etc), and for metadata/task-management tasks(GTD, working things out, mind maps, todo lists, solving software problems) is a plain cheap notebook and a pen.
If you study GTD the hardest aspects of GTD are sticking to routine, and it's very easy to fall off the GTD routine. Its hard to do weekly reviews, its hard to create next tasks etc etc.
Once you establish a cycle that works, its magic.
GP should be diligent to download his spreadsheets periodically.
At the same time my notebook information is a mix of personal things, work things and lots of other notes, scribblings, and free form information(mind maps, doodling, random writing), I need this just because creating a meta-data knowledge graph, list in the brain is just too much work, stressful and its like a offline store for your brain's functions.
Software tools don't work well for this kind of information input and putting it in either GDrive would not be good. Hence the notebook and pen.
Another big thing I've noticed is the personal productivity system is a catalyst that helps you do work, its not your main work itself. There is little incentive in storing what time you went to gym ten years back. Information/Feature pollution is a bug not a feature.
Unfortunately, Org-mode in emacs, like anything in emacs is a full time project in itself, a huge time sink that has little return on time investment. Use a tool to make your life better. Don't spend time wandering in sub goals trying to make the tool, that makes your life better. The former gives results, the latter is just a long play time sink, where you will forever make the tool better, you will never arrive at making your life better.
Notice at some point you are just making a wiki. And of course now you have the added effort budget of maintaining the wiki on top of your regular work.
I have seen random posts on the internet where people were migrating their notes systems to org mode or markdown. If you ask me that's too much meta work to do, in order to do your main work.
The entire idea behind making a knowledge system, or a todo system is to help you do things. If you are doing whole project to set these things up, I wonder what the actual goal of this system even is.
I migrated to org from Things some 12 years ago and since I started bare-bones (just todo entries, no special config) and grew as my needs arose, I never felt I had to invest lots of time in my setup.
Agree that some people overdo things and the tools become projects on their own though.
Everything can break in weird ways. What you said is equivalent to, well, if the US internet infrastructure was attacked and disabled.
They got a court order, contacted Google, and did a Google Takeout of literally all of my data.
Now I use markdown doc on a remotely encrypted share via WinSCP.
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.Related is that motivation is fleeting and only leads to individual acts. Discipline on the other hand is what builds habits. It's what you do day and and day out that leads to success or failure.
Discipline is important, but without motivation you will end up doubting why you are working so hard on something you don't care about. In my mind, motivation is continually reminding yourself of what outcomes you're working towards, so you don't lose sight of why you're working so hard.
For example, motivating yourself to work out by thinking of that sporting hobby you'll be able to take up or thinking about how great you'll feel when you've reached your goal weight.
Lisa: Where does a man get inspiration to write a song like that?
Jeff: He gets it from the landlady once a month.
Another one that I like, and it isn’t clear who said it first, is:
Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment.>"Virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions," Aristotle said. The writer Will Durant interpreted it thusly: "We are what we repeatedly do… therefore excellence is not an act, but a habit." https://dailystoic.com/we-are-what-we-repeatedly-do/
What Aristotle talks about in Ethics is not only a habit or actions but also what drives that.
The successful ones have a repeatable process for balancing creativity with the time required to produce a work of art. They tend to have a daily practice of challenging / improving their skills. They setup a dedicated studio, and work at reducing disruptions and so on.
Creative workers regularly discuss the ways to get ourselves to work when we feel a total lack of inspiration for something with a looming deadline, as well as ways to create conditions where some kind of creative inspiration is more likely.
There is also the fact that sometimes "inspiration" can lead to a long process, I am finally nearing the end of a multi-year process of grinding away at drawing a comic book that came from the simple idea of "what if I told a story from two sides, with the characters changing designs to ones that scream 'Good Guys' or 'Bad Guys' depending on which side we are currently following".
That sounds cool.
Game of Thrones was like that. You just got a good hate on, for one of the characters, and they went and spoiled it, by telling their story.
The Boltons were bad news, though. Even the author hated them.
> I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp.
I ended up releasing the note-taking/reminder app as a subscription service [0], for reasons most obvious. Over time I wanted more from these notes...
I wanted a way to separate notes of different clients -- folders. I wanted a way to categorize all notes related to different topics of interest -- tags. I wanted an email to send me a summary of notes in a folder to submit my invoice or produce a weekend reading list -- email summaries. I wanted to do all my bookkeeping in my notes, and on..
I ended up releasing the parser for the notes as an open source lib [1]. Which could add a nice layer on top of any plain-text note system running locally.
0. https://www.tatatap.com 1. https://github.com/tatatap-com/sowhat
I'm curious, do many people use the SMS note save feature? Or is many people the wrong unit of measure for an SMS service? (I've wondered if users would have a reversion to things like this as well...)
Edit: Just saw now, you've submitted this on showHN before, maybe tweak the timing for the post and the title for better results ?
A bit more meta is that the habit itself is primarily all I need. I journal, write things down, etc... and almost never look at them again. The habit of doing is all it takes for me to set my day on the right trajectory.
For some reason, I prefer pens over pencils.
In the end I wrote a small tool to assist with starting each day with a blank journal and all remaining items from the last day. Syntax is primarily markdown. Everything stays in a single text file.
If you read it, TFA is more than just a folksy phrase like "make it a habit."
You can write them everywhere, read them everywhere, send them everywhere, effortlessly back them up and copy them. You absolutely own a text file on your computer. They're maximally cross-compatible (barring some quirks like UNIX/DOS linebreaks). Every computer and phone has a basic text processor.
Compare with a dedicated tool like Evernote - I now have to worry about the installing it, maintaining it, having my workflow broken by a new update, the developers selling my data to China, etc.
I've experienced a big productivity boost by using the desktop background of my 43" monitor as a whiteboard (blackboard actually). I have an jpg the size of my monitor that I jot things down on as text on the image. I can store meaningful small images the trigger my memory to do something. I've become so used to visually thinking about what I'm doing that I switched my text file todo list to markdown so I could store images in it.
It's surprisingly quick to keep my large jpg open in paint and jot or paste things to it and then reset it as the desktop background. I learned later this is called a "vision board"
Still, I'm so bad at spacing out that I need more than looking at my vision board monitor all day, so I use the Windows system scheduler to bring up a daily, weekly and monthly html file that reminds me to do things.
The coolest thing about vision board desktop background is that I save them every two weeks or so and start another. I now have a folder of two years of my thinking in visual form that's easy to review in just a few minutes. It may be that this works for me because I'm a visual person and others need to write it down and rewrite it down often to learn it.
You need to put "Look at the list" on the list!
That sounds facetious, but for GTD it makes some sense. "Do maintenance on GTD" as one periodically-important goal.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/microsoft-sticky-notes/9nb...
I'll just share some of those old links for new kids on the OBTF block.
Probably one of the discussion starters in 2005: https://web.archive.org/web/20060101001857/http://www.oreill...
Which apparently got inspiration from this: https://craphound.com/lifehacks2.txt
And was passionately discussed by the 43 Folders crowd: https://www.43folders.com/2005/08/17/life-inside-one-big-tex...
Me, I essentially stole and fine-tuned the syntax exlained here: http://www.matthewcornell.org/blog/2005/8/21/my-big-arse-tex...
OBTF vs Zettelkasten (from 2020): https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/1508/zettelkasten-v...
I've tried to set up a Zettelkasten many times, but in practice, loosely structured flat files, maybe utilizing the OS' file system (folders) and occasional ad-hoc hierarchies, still beats everything else for me.
That said, I'm not sure I'd exclusively use a plain text file or even Org if I had to break my day down into as low as 15 minute chunks like this guy. I find the text-based approach to work best for longer-term planning/strategizing and just keeping yourself from forgetting stuff over the course of days. It also works better if you're already on your computer and using your text editor all day and/or SSH-ing into a box with the file. If I need to remember to make it to 4 meetings today at very specific times, something that pushes notifications and upcoming meeting warnings might accommodate that better.
I've had meeting-heavy jobs, and split off the meeting management into Outlook (or similar) with good results. Useful info that flows out of meetings can still go into your notes to be organized later though. Then I make my GTD list "task-centric", meaning that it focuses on getting discrete activities started and completed, with less focus on times/dates. That requires some level of freedom to manage your own time though, so it's not for everyone.
plan-edit() {
cd ~/wiki &&
git diff --exit-code &&
vim Rav-priority-queue.txt &&
! git diff --quiet Rav-priority-queue.txt &&
git commit -qm 'Update Rav-priority-queue.txt' Rav-priority-queue.txt &&
git pull -q --rebase &&
git push -q
}It's important to me that I can take notes on my phone because it's the thing I have on me most of the time (unlike a laptop or notebook). Sometimes a random thought pops up and will distract me until I write it down. On my laptop I can use the Signal desktop app to view, add, or search notes. Every note automatically gets a timestamp and is synced between my devices. Both taking and viewing notes works without an Internet connection.
Notes can't be edited but more information can be added by replying to a note and the new information gets its own timestamp. Sometimes I also use emoji reactions as tags. Recently I've started to use groups in which I'm the only member as note categories (e.g. ideas, thoughts, journal, work).
Yes. I use email - text/plain, on Thunderbird. I save the unaddressed email in the local Drafts folder (doesn't depend on internet). If I need to edit, I can open it, edit it, and save it in-place (it replaces the original). I own a smartphone, but I don't carry it around.
TBird has a tasklist, but it's pretty bad - a lot worse than a textfile.
alias "note"="echo $1 >> ~/.notes/`date+'%Y-%m-%d'`.note"
Then to view them I either just cat it, or jump in to a text editor. I have an alias to cat todays .note
alias "notes"="cat ~/.notes/`date+'%Y-%m-%d'`.note"
[1]https://www.williamhern.com/living-in-a-single-text-file.html
[2]http://www.43folders.com/2005/08/17/life-inside-one-big-text-fileI have so, so much to say about how to make this approach work. Please AMA if you have any interest in this.
[1] OK, full disclosure, my main file does sometimes spawn child Markdown files for particular projects. I don't apologize for this! A lot of the challenge around sustaining a useful to-do list over multiple months and years is managing the cruft of your thought. If the document gets too crufty or weedy, it becomes an impediment to thought rather than an aid, and you will let it languish. I have a pretty detailed system for mitigating this risk. Spawning child documents for the weedy stuff + "link" to the child in the main is an important technique here.
(Once we start talking about links you might imagine we could use a wiki, but the most important property of the system is to stay lightweight and at-the-speed-of-thought - I use it to capture requirements during meetings, for example.)
I used to try various productivity apps because I thought I needed something to help with reducing the "amount of willpower" I needed to keep a to do list.
Ultimately I realized I had been using Sublime Text for years to take temporary notes in a very unorganized manner. Since April 2021 I'm happy with the todo lists/notes I keep in Sublime.
It is not about the tools that gives you all the features but the freedom to be free of tools and just pick up the raw things right away anywhere, anytime, even if it requires more learning in the beginning.
After a while, the habits, the processes just become muscle memory. One may indeed use a tool on the top when one is comfortable with how the plain text is organized.
He uses pen and paper for notes and todos. Nothing else.
The other oddity is that he uses the internet read-only, except for email. Zero social media accounts, forums, no mobile apps other than the standard ones. He doesn't exist online.
I admire him. There's no need for productivity suites or "life hacks" when you keep things simple, focus, and remove all distractions.
Besides avoiding personal distractions, he's also my role model in avoiding work distractions. He commits to one or two projects and ignores everything else. He won't answer your email or chat and won't attend your meeting. He cuts through nonsense like a human laser.
I love that metaphor!
But sure, in order to really make it shine and you'll want to use Emacs and something like orgzly on the phone.
Karl Voit is doing the hard work of rallying folks to promote org markup outside of Emacs and hopefully create a diverse ecosystem under the Orgdown proposal https://gitlab.com/publicvoit/orgdown
Incidentally, the system I use is from Mark Forster's 'Autofocus' constellation of productivity experiments. Unfortunate that his work is not more widely known because it's quite effective (for me at least).
Here's a link to the version I use: http://markforster.squarespace.com/blog/2021/11/16/the-final...
Wonderful to hear. Thank you.
I figure more people should be aware of this open source tool I hope improves and becomes more robust.
[1]: https://logseq.com/
I'm not a logseq user but have toyed around with it and am really hoping it gets to a rock-solid state soon. Development has been moving super fast but I'm not quiteeee ready to trust it with all my notes. I'll probably switch once they release a beta (as it's currently alpha software).
https://joearms.github.io/published/2014-06-25-minimal-viabl...
It's the most flexible system I've ever used. The only missing features for me are the ability to reorder items quickly on mobile and add reminders to a todo. But control over my own data beats both of those features.
After a score, I'm came to the same conclusion as the article; plain text just works. I log in vim using ISO 8601 date stamped records in the log format of (priority - datetime stamp - keywords/tag - content) inspired by Randy Pausch https://youtu.be/oTugjssqOT0 others noticed too: https://github.com/nrr-deprecated/todo
Sorting by date, priority or keyword keeps me on track and helps for quarterly summaries.
A simple bash loop runs annually to give me a fresh 365 dashboard of days but inserts are a datetime stamp command - keywords autocompleted - then actual typing the meat of the task/content
Because all text is in a single file, vim autocomplete saves typing as I use CamelCase for keywords; vim dict helps too.
Caveat: For enjoyment, I still use fountain pens and paper for a running top 3 priority and scribbling offline. Backup interop is via TiddlyWiki for reference archive and sync with a plain text Zettelkasten (heavy on vim gf, Rg, FZF and jq for TiddlyWiki json export)
Plain text is built to last.
Advantages:
- Instant availability (no need to load up an app)
- Works offline
- I can't access it when I'm not at work (feature, not a bug)
- I can draw as well as write
- It's satisfying to tick items off
[1] https://gist.github.com/madphilosopher/c71dac84a096533d335bf...
When I worked, my daily todo list would have been:
* Spend another day working on Project X.
Now it's all domestic tasks, which fall into two categories: tasks that have to be done urgently, and those I can do "when I feel like it".
Guess what? My todo list now consists of one or two things I must do urgently, and getting on for a coupla hundred blue-sky tasks that'll never be done.
Task #1: weed the todo list (high priority)
I've never been much good at time-management, as you can see.
I use a naming format for the task file, including the date and a short task description, e.g:
task.2021.12.23.short.task.description.txt
Number of task files created since 2012:
Task files: 18231 Total size: 350 MB
For each day I also create a worklog of the tasks I've been working on that day (including minutes spent). Since 2012 I've registered 2540 daily worklog files:
ls -l task.????.??.??.worklog.txt |wc -l
2540
My big complaint is that there isn't a decent Windows client. I sometimes will use the web version, but it's maddening because some of the keystrokes for things like word left or word right (ctrl-arrow) don't work.
I have one exception: any 1:1 meeting with a person gets its own note and those go in a specific folder. One note per person and a bullet list under a date, with talking points. I also use this ahead of meetings; when I suddenly think of something I need to discuss with someone, I add it to their note. Then when I meet them, it's part of my agenda.
It's also searcheable so if I need to refresh my memory about an older discussion, whether it took place and when, it's a few keywords away.
I've got an almost 4,000 line file with the same kind of stuff for work, every day since 27th March 2019. It includes not just what I did, but also things like IDs for data in various environments so I can go straight back to what I was doing if needed.
At the end of one day I add the entry for the next day (mine is Markdown and the latest is at the top) to remind me of things I've discovered that will be relevant, and I update the current day's entry as I go.
I use Markdown because I use bullet lists almost exclusively (brief, with nested children for detail). It's also great for short code blocks.
Having seen my file during remote stand-ups I now have several colleagues doing similar. There really is no need for anything fancier.
But remember - frequent dated backups and if possible (and you're an employee) use networked drives so you are enrolled in corporate backups too.
IIRC Jef Raskin's The Humane Interface, which expounds in part on his Canon CAT features and philosophy, proposed [and/or "stole" w/o credit] integrated email within the editor hard-wired to a single file.
When I came back visiting my old colleagues one of their gift was my txt file printed on paper, it was a few centimeters thick :)
But what have been most compelling of Markdown is that I can create flow diagrams with Mermaid syntax and type math like LaTeX. Not to mention insert code snippets. It all works.
And Markdown is portable too. Couple it with rclone for replication to the cloud and I’m golden.
A single .txt file can work as a to-do-list and a what-done list but it really isn't a knowledgebase like Obsidian or Roam. It is more comparable to a To Do List app like Microsoft To-Do or Amazing Marvin.
It wouldn't work as a knowledgebase because a knowledgebase has copious amounts of text about a topic which wouldn't fit neatly in the by day subdivision.
Although, I don't use Roam Research, I think the single .txt file approach also has similarities with the Roam style of using Daily Notes and Outlines.
Roam Research is an outliner which emphasizes not using paragraphs of text but instead just using bullet points. His single .txt file approach is also using this outline and bullet-style approach and I think it is an underrated aspect of why his approach works.
Using an outline and bullet points helps a lot, to quickly see the forest and the trees; I've only recently realized how powerful this approach is and so I think it's worth mentioning.
On a personal note, I've operated for years without a to do list app and so I can easily imagine someone using a single .txt file and being way more productive with it. But I highly recommend anyone to try Microsoft To-Do or Amazing Marvin or the single .txt approach since I agree that it is better than going without.
The biggest advantage to me is splitting files, and indexing. I'm only using it on my phone. (Notepad++ makes this easy enough for me at work that i write everything out as separate files, downside being i don't use tags was often as I should for finding things later).
The best system is one which can easily change. By making the backend plaintext files on the system, portability is preserved with no extra steps.
I've also been using a plain "todo.txt" for 20+ years and also use UltraEdit. So far, it's been better than alternatives such as Borland Sidekick, PalmPilot gadgets, Evernote.
I agree with all the positives the author laid out but I also recognize there are serious limitations with my reliance on "todo.txt".
- no "live" schedule of upcoming events because there's no runtime that turns the text file into active reminders and a countdown of when things are due. A lot of people have a "inner clock" in their head and don't need countdowns but my brain seems to to lack this. E.g. the author has example of "11:30am meet with student Enya" and when I write entries like that, the 11:30am time comes and goes because I got distracted.
- not editable by others. Sometimes, important people in my life remind me I need to do X,Y,Z but I often don't get around to the tedious data entry of adding it to to the text so it gets overlooked.
The issues above are solved better by a cloud or smartphone app but I'd miss the instant access speed and flexibility of the text file. That's why I'm working on some tools to create a runtime that converts my "todo.txt" into something that pings me on my smartphone and gives me a better live dashboard for activities.
For live scheduling, I generally have my meetings clumped together so I just go to the next meeting or take a break when one is over. If it's a sporadic meeting day, there's still the calendar on my phone as a backup alarm in case I forget. So far I've missed maybe a handful of meetings over the past 14 years, so it hasn't really been an issue.
People can schedule on my calendar the regular way, but I don't like them editing or even viewing my todo/done file because I make a lot of quick personal notes that I'm not ready for others to read, like my thoughts about someone's talk or paper.
So thanks for posting this, Simone.
Writing with a pen also has the advantage that working remotely, people do not wonder if you're sending slack messages or emails instead of paying attention because you're typing. My notebook also doesn't need any privacy features.
For your last point about working remotely, I sometimes wonder if I spend a few hours working through some problem on paper, my chat avatar will go to inactive ("last seen 23 minutes ago") and people might think I've wandered off.
Not all data is same.
Personal Knowledge Database is not the same as metadata things like todo lists, often todo lists don't need searching, back up etc.
Also one must look at tools as things to achieve end goals, not as goals themselves. Data pollution is a thing, and having extra things isnt always good.
When I need to save something I just Ctrl-C it. Its my code snippet manager I can instantly find something I wrote years ago. https://bluemars.org/clipx/
Synced in Dropbox, only available on my laptops (on purpose), only ever opened with Sublime Text, and using my own syntax highlighting, keywords and autocompletions. A new block of text for every day. Nothing is ever deleted. Consistent writing style, lots of checkboxes, and an onthology of tags to categorise everything.
File size at time of writing: 3.5 MB.
Anything that requires you to wait for a program to start, a window to appear, or a webpage to load is very detrimental to the mental mode of note taking because thoughts change even on the slightest of latency. It should be as immediate as picking up a notebook from the table that has a pen attached to it.
I have a few scripts on top of the client to make things even easier like sprint to see tickets in the current sprint, jv to view a ticket, take to grab a ticket, transition to transition a ticket and slackscrum to push the tickets I've worked on today to slack for my scrum update.
I'd create folders by month like "01 November", "02 December" and inside of those folders I'd create projects like "01 New Project", "02 Another Project".
It functions like a To-Do list in that it reminds me to work on a particular project and when I'm done, I can move it to a _Done folder.
For short-term reminders though, like with an upcoming meeting, I'd just write it down on my Boox Tablet on a weekly calendar template.
For a what-done list, I'm not sure if there is real value with writing down everything I've done for the day. I think short-term memory is good enough and for longer time periods, there are usually emails or commits that can answer the question on what was done.
For calendars, the problem is a bit more problematic, though. Yes, there are things like calendar[1] and remind[2], but nobody seems to use them nowadays and in the mobile world there is no app to process them. Do you know of any existing solutions for calendars that work like todotxt?
I think this is the ideal middle point: I can easily go back and see old information, but I also don't feel that I'm "wasting" important space if I feel like writing down more things in a particular day.
Here is a simple system in Markdown that I've been using for some time: https://github.com/YJPL/personal-kanban.
My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22276184 - Feb 2020 (402 comments)
On this topic, what calendar software do people use? I'm a very disorganized person, never used calendars to keep track of my life. Maybe I'll try it out. I'd like something independent from Google/Microsoft/$BIGTECH.
YYYY-MM-DD
Project 1. Daily notes.
N.M hours
TODO Project 2. Notes
Plus a number of discarded A4 papers with a clean rear side filled with short term todo lists. Occasionally they become not so short term v_v
I'm using Emacs so I should learn Org mode but that simple file bought me so far so I'm unsure what Org mode will actually gain to me.
All I really needed to get started was to understand the equivalent syntax to the basic features Markdown would offer.
The problem I’ve found with many note taking apps is that it takes too long to simply write something down and find it later. Having simple “files” reduces friction and gets out of the way. Sometimes simpler is better.
I keep things very simple though. I never found modern "productivity apps" very helpful personally. They all require too much work to maintain like Notion, etc.
I have a big, append-only TXT file that I keep in Dropbox. Most of my notes and bookmarks go there. I sometimes add hashtags, I use #book for books that I might want to read in the future.
If I have too many notes of some kind, I make a separate file for them, I'm considering moving my to read list to its own file, for example.
I kept a separate file with a calendar until I switched to Mac OS, I use the built-in calendar app these days.
Your calendar would easily become that, unless you are always excellent at estimating what you are able to do on each day. Also, what days will you put items on which has no set date? What about when priorities change? Do you then have to reorder items on a lot of days in your calendar?
I also somehow feel that just listing down tasks on Tomboy in terms of achievable chunks helps my focus.
By whittling it down to the bare essentials you at least know if you are unproductive it's not because you are faffing around with the tracking of your own tasks.
That's why I'm so happy with org-mode. Seriously give it a try. It's syntax is not far from what I was using on my own - though it seems that I independently invented Mardown - just that it uses a * for headings rather than # (which I choose because of C comments). Org-mode has been around since around the turn of the century I think. And I'm happy to open the org-mode files in VIM and edit them there if need be.
App require maintenance and are out of your control; right now a chunk of my personal process is a mess because some stuff depended on Evernote. Which was great for about a decade until it got a complete rewrite as an Electron app, and now it's super slow and keeps adding new "friendly" stuff that gets in between me and my notes. I haven't found a replacement that's not full of its own problems and it's impossible to downgrade to the old, perfectly functional native apps on the iThings (and eventually an OS update will break all the apps), it's incredibly frustrating. The parts of my process that depend on writing stuff down in a paper journal, meanwhile, continue to work exactly the same.
Apple Notes will let you import directly from an Evernote export, but it is missing some features (no note links, no quick search/jump, hard to navigate nested folders as notes are hidden by default, no export).
Yeah, and probably online-only. Or, if offline-use is allowed, probably use as much memory as his system has free...
And, of course, every 2 years it would stop being supported, be sold to another company, turned into online-only and contain non-stop ads, and he'd maybe switch to a new app.
And relearn how to take notes again.
> It's quirky idea but it's really not that practical.
Seems pretty practical to me:
1. Easy and flexible searching.
2. Very quick to add notes to (Double-clicking on a .txt file takes maybe 250ms to open in Vim).
3. Versioning, if you want it (add it to your repo).
4. Online-editing if he wants that (host it on a WebDAV server).
5. Viewable (and likely editable) on every single device he owns, even his TV if its hosted somewhere.
Downsides:
1. No Ads.
2. Not forced into learning a new workflow every few years.
3. Doesn't cost anything.
(Admittedly, the downside is only a downside for those in the business of trrr to replace the text file)..
Everything I've found from 1Writer to all those minimal txt apps just uses Apple's very very basic search UI.
I'd need search through several files, and especially their contents, not just file names or titles, also regexp.
It'd only need two pages. A list of notes, and a single page for editing notes. Perhaps a login page, but you could simplify further and just use HTTP Basic Auth. You wouldn't even need any JavaScript if you don't mind having to click a button to save your note instead of having it constantly updated as you type.
But how do you incorporate workflow into this, particularly task-management for both one-time and repeat tasks?
(I can think of a few possibilities. I'm interested in what you're doing specifically in this regard, if anything.)
I used to find myself moving between random terminals so used curl webdav instead of DropBox.
python3 -m pip install mercurial
In addition to all the virtues of version control, Mercurial can also be run with an HTTP interface that is rather good.
Thus, you could have a main box at home with a main Mercurial repository and run the daemon in the root of the repository:
hg serve -d --config web.push_ssl=No --config "web.allow_push=*" -A hg-access.log -E hg-errors.log
Your laptop would also have Mercurial installed. You would clone from and push to the server. You could view the server content from any client using a browser.
I do not ask for any kingdom, but a good friendship is always welcome. ^_^
I'd like to improve on Google Docs when it comes to rapidly jotting personal notes/referring to to-dos across devices through the day.
So, it's not just a single .txt file. It's an email app, a calendar app, and Org Mode with more steps and no features?