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Comment by serf | Hacker News Reader

i'm with you as long as -- by design -- it consists of the plainest of plain text, and will migrate with me along my life.

otherwise all the shine and chrome in the world won't make it superior to a filing cabinet and some free time.

that's the difficulty point for all of these personal PIM type tools, they all have their own biased view on things like file format and 'touchability' of stored data in the (unannounced) hopes of trapping a captive audience; no good.

Open standards, open formats, and a revenue stream that isn't user-hostile -- then i'm in.

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Agree with the plainest-of-plain-text approach. For me, the more structured the note system, the less it is used. I have a simple script called `n` that operates on a `notes.txt` on my NAS. If given arguments, it appends a timestamp and the arguments (verbatim) to the notes file. This serves as a super quick way to jot something down or log an action (`n determined Krylon adheres best for project X`, `n timestamp placeholder for server X reboot`). Alternatively, calling it with no arguments appends a timestamp and opens vim in insert mode at the bottom of the file. Finally, I have an alias `nt` to open `less` at the bottom of the notes file, for quick review (`alias nt=less +G ~/share/notes.txt`).

The main script is:

  ~$ cat share/bin/n
  #! /usr/bin/env bash
  cd $HOME/share # or wherever you want to put your notes
  echo >> notes.txt
  echo -n '# ' >> notes.txt
  date '+%a %d %b %Y %T %Z' | tr -d "\n" >> notes.txt
  echo ' #' >> notes.txt
  if [[ $# -ne 0 ]]; then
    echo $@ >> notes.txt
    tail notes.txt
  else
    vim "+normal Go" +startinsert notes.txt # or nano: nano -R +-1 notes.txt
  fi

This script is accessible from all my personal machines as well as appropriate work machines. It works well enough. I've devised a small system of tags and keywords, but that part is not particularly interesting. I just put the keywords at the beginning of a line and search for them with /^thekeyword/.

More structured notes go into dokuwiki or just a LibreOffice file in the project folder.

All this is almost guaranteed to be readable in 20 years. The LibreOffice files may be at more risk, but at least there is more than one tool available to read them.

Do you look back over these notes and find them useful? Perhaps it's my ADD or the nature of the software products I create, but for the past 20 years of my career, I've never kept significant notes and never found myself missing them. I'm wondering if there's something I don't know that I don't know here.

Quickly check the last note to remember what I was doing? Often. Search through? Rarely, maybe once a month. The times I do though it's really helpful. I realized I was forgetting lots of semi important things that had no default place to write down.

This frequency informed the design, in fact. Easy to write, easy to read the last couple entries, moderate difficulty in finding older entries (in exchange for lower cost of making individual notes).

I think for me this is why it's so important for the system to be almost zero effort, else I'll just kinda stop using it. Just having an ubiquitous default place to dump something out of my brain helps.

Of note. A very slightly modified version of this runs on an ancient Thinkpad in my bedroom for diary/mental health reasons. I find the separation helpful. Those I almost never ever read, but I think that's the point of those.

Edit: at work I didn't really use this system, it's mostly for my own life. At work I used the ticket tracker, wikis, and calendar. I found that taking personal notes at work was best substituted by making actual documents that my team could find and use. There were much fewer uncategorized tasks at work.

I refer to mine constantly. Just one example: I wrote this one a few days ago and I've already referred back to it for four separate projects in the past 48 hours: https://til.simonwillison.net/python/pyproject

I use them for cooking. I refer to this one every time I want to make a Pisco Sour cocktail, for example: https://til.simonwillison.net/cocktails/pisco-sour

I see notes as a way of accumulating micro-skills - things I know how to do, but not well enough to remember off the top of my head.

This is cool. I do something similar but with an IRC server that I run and expose over wireguard.

I have a channel where my various IOT devices tell me stuff, a channel where my algorithmic trading bot notifies me, and a reminders channel that basically serves as an append-only, always-synched memopad.

Hmm that's interesting. My notifications niche is filled by my home assistant setup, but that's lacking persistence.

The only revenue stream that isn’t user-hostile is subscriptions. And people generally hate that: imo, the web ended up ad-supported because users did not want to pay every website they used directly and it remains ad-supported because users continue to reject the viable alternatives (subscriptions, services like Blendle, some micropayment scheme).

Yeah, subscriptions is tough for this because it needs to be a solution which lasts a lifetime - it's hard to confidently subscribe to something that I may end up paying for decades, especially if it may turn out not to be the right solution in the long-run.

I think some combination of a subscription and source escrow would be ideal here: if the service goes under, some third-party releases the source to subscribed customers.

Why only plain text? Images have a lot of value

I'm not the op but posted about my own text system. In short, I never used images in my notes even when adding them was easy, so I saved myself the trouble of having to deal with rich document formats. With the goal of portability and tool agnosticism in mind, I believe a plain text file is better for me. Everything can break or be replaced, yet I'll be able to continue my work habits using nothing more than notepad or even EDIT.EXE. I'm reasonably confident markdown or html will be readable for a long time, but I value ultra simplicity here. I think ultimately it's a matter of personal taste.

When I produce images, it's nearly always in the context of a project, which has a wiki or other system. But that's outside of what I'd personally call "notes".

Markdown and html can display local images. The only tricky thing is if you want to place images in separate folders and how you maintain that structure over time.

I believe that charts and diagrams convey a lot of information that cannot be easily reproduced with raw text. I guess it ultimately depends on the topic you are reviewing.

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