Notetime: Minimalistic notes where everything is timestamped | Hacker News Reader

Notetime: Minimalistic notes where everything is timestamped

notetimeapp.com

193 pointsgohberg132 comments

I like the idea, but not the web-based implementation. Local first, and ideally an open source app that can work offline when I'm going distraction free.

It feels like a vim plugin. It definitely feels like org-mode can do this.

A few years back I had a little command line tool where I could log things quickly - it was like syslog for humans - but with #hashtags for projects or clients, and then a small tool that would work out how long I'd spent on different things. It required me to write a log every time I finished a task or a pomodoro. I might resurrect that, but having an open file has been cute for me for quite a while, and then I can go back and copy/paste what I need to draft docs and so on.

I do think "note taking" as an app is actually under-served. There's lots of wiki plugins, org-mode, tons of "productivity tools", but actually a single app that lets you just write, then helps you with review (and timestamps, contexts and so on are essential to that), and then figure out actions/todos and gives you seamless interaction with those, and integration with 3rd-party tools (I don't want to copy and paste between vim/emacs/JIRA/asana/notion/trello/apple notes/calendar reminders/outlook tasks/whatever), would be very, very neat.

I came here to type all of these thoughts, and found you'd already expressed them (and more). Even the bit about making my own command line tool.

Agree!

`jrnl` commandline tool does the same with a text file. You can sync it with dropbox and use the same journal across multiple machines.

Nice one, thanks! Mine was for a more specific use case but this could be really helpful.

Thanks for the hat-tip on `jrnl` - this is a much better version of the cmd line tool I talked about in my comment above and I am now starting to use it. Great logistics being cli-based, think I'm going to be using it plenty.

I'm doing this via VSCode, Cline and various services connected via MCP. Works quite well.

I do this with Zim (desktop wiki).

Fellow Zim user here. Is there a way to add time stamps to each line in Zim like this app does?

Yes, there is. The manual way is to press CTRL+d where you'd like a date. Or read the thread at [1] to configure Zim adds the date on Return.

[1] https://github.com/zim-desktop-wiki/zim-desktop-wiki/issues/...

    $ ts | tee -a notes

Or just ts >>notes

on macOS, just:

echo "$(date) Do something" | tee -a notes

thanks for the feedback!

Being a developer, I'm aware that the desktop ecosystem offers a plethora of tools for this.

I think my main inspiration in this project was to combine the simplicity of apple notes with timestamped entries, being able to log notes in this form from any kind of device and having cross-device sync.

I released the local-only version so it will be useful to privacy-minded folks but I do plan to have a cross-device backup and sync option since I believe it's a very compelling feature.

I have a command line tool that just takes a line of input, then writes the time stamped entry to a text file, one per quarter. A cron job pops up a terminal once an hour during business hours. I use that log to prepare for performance reviews to recall what I’d worked on, and I often go back to remember details about a problem I solved months or years ago. It’s fantastic, been using it for seven years.

In 2023, I wrote another script that appends a line to a csv file every 5 minutes. The line includes the focused window class, command line, title, name of the git branch that’s currently checked out, system idle time, and WiFi access point name. So I know pretty much how long I was working on everything vs other stuff like slack.

I’m finally starting to write tools to visualize and analyze this data. Is it going to change how I work? Not really, but for some reason I like seeing at a glance how I spent my time.

In my work I often need to know when things happened, for scenarios like: interviews, incidents, protocol meetings, experiments, debugging, etc

I noticed there was no simple way to achieve this with any note taking app, so I made one.

* every line you write is automatically timestamped.

* minimalist and distraction free - follows the simplicity of the built-in note apps.

* cross platform - it's a webapp so no install required, works great on mobile, web, android, iOS, tablets.

you can use it for free, no email and no signup required.

I made this first version where data is stored locally on your device.

Sharing here in case someone finds it useful, it would be great to know I solved the same problem for anyone else :)

Wow! I was thinking the same notes app like a month or two ago, even tried to create it! Can you open-source it? So we can contribute, and make it self hosted?

the code is quite embarrassing, imagine backend engineer writing frontend with the help of AI :) but since it's a common request, I'll consider it

All code is embarrassing, and there will always be someone that comes along to ask "wow, why did you write THIS in this way? I wouldn't have done it that way!"

https://github.com/unstppbl/nta

I went ahead and created the app with Claude 3.7, backend is in Go, frontend is in React. Sqlite is used for storage.

There is also a docker-compose file.

Anyone can contribute

thanks for that!

This is lovely. I maintain a dev log at work where I manually time-stamp entries section wise, but many times I’m doing it after the fact. Ability to edit the time stamps and then search based on it would make this super powered.

Actually, I would love to combine this with Heynote[0], have you considered it?

[0]: https://heynote.com/

Very useful app. Thanks for sharing

Why not just use Notepad in Windows and hit F5 Time/Date at need?

9:54 AM 3/21/2025

That said, this sort of thing has me wishing for something like to Services support in Windows where that could be implemented as a Service by Notepad and then used in any context where text input is acceptable.

The additional metadata like tags, and the overall streamlining of the workflow. Yes, most things can be taped together with a little effort, but if this is something that vibes very well with you, then this is a substantial incremental improvement.

I use AutoHotkey's text replacement to drop different date formats. Typing "]ts" in an input replaces it with 03/21/2025 10:10:48

  ::]ts::{
    Send(FormatTime(,"MM/dd/yyyy HH:mm:ss"))
    Return
  }

Beware the syntax differences between Autohotkey 1 and 2 when searching documentation

Please take this as your official notice that you use dates completely wrong and the world thinks you are a terrible person. If you would like to be a good person, please correct your horrific use of dates immediately

Medium/Small/Big Big:Medium:Small - No! Bad American!

Big-Medium-Small Big:Medium:Small—Yes! You're now ISO 8601 compliant!

TL;DR:

  Send(FormatTime(,"yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss"))

That's why I use AHK for my favorite timestamps like 20250321102123, I prefer year first as well but when in Rome.

ISO 8601 is a great standard when you need interoperability (e.g. between machines/servers, or between humans in different locales) or the ability to sort by timestamp.

For personal note taking, or notes to be shared locally, it makes sense to use your local locale's format.

yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss

There is no F5 key on iphones :)

I couldn't find any simple apple-notes-like app, that is available on all platforms, and allows logging in this style.

my private version of this app has cross-device sync, it's just not fully baked yet since I need to implement some form of signup (google/apple), and there's also the privacy issue people are concerned about which I'm not sure how to address.

Point!

If you could make a way to share a note attached to a specific name, it would work very nicely for one usage which needs timestamping I've been working on (which is why I had the F5 thing at the ready), tracking how long it takes to cut a given file on a CNC, then sharing that result.

you mean sharing a note externally with someone over the internet?

I could probably do something like that, based on URL-encoding, but it will have a limit of approx ~ 2000 characters

Yes.

Having the note encoded in the URL would be a great way to share that.

added a share option in the note editor, let me know what you think

Thanks!

I'll start using it for sharing times of Carbide Motion files.

EDIT: One last feature request --- add an option/UI where a beginning time allotment could be entered (say 60 minutes for a 1 hr. meeting) and the time would be counted down for each entry? and then then time over shown once the allotment was used up? This would seem to match the typical usage of managing notes for a meeting.

For bonus points, add in a way to add hourly rates so that the on-going cost of the meeting will show up? (though maybe that's too cluttered).

Looks good. How do I share across devices?

Would I ever be able to see the source, or run whatever backend the above request requires myself? Maybe I've answered my first question and this thing is 100% client side.

I've been using https://www.usememos.com/ as of late, so the concept resonates with me. It's the first note taking app I've went all in on that seems to make time a first-class feature. Yours takes that even further by breaking it down per entry.

this is the local-only version, everything is stored in a db in your browser. the backend just serves the app and creates anonymous users. my private version of the app has cross-device sync, it's just not ready yet for the public, because it relies on google/apple signup and storing the notes on a server, and I know it deters some privacy-minded folks.

I'll consider the self hosted route.

If you use org-mode, you can just set up a git repo which auto-commits with gitwatch. And run magit-blame when you want the timestamps. With the advantage that it doesn't distract you when you don't need to see them, but super useful when you want to check when a note is written.

Why git though? Wouldn't it be simpler to just append the timestamp to the beginning or end of each line/paragraph, and just hide it when editing?

Yeah, I do something similar with org-node (org-roam alternative) where every capture templates has an inactive timestamp at the end before the tags.

i.e. Idea: Build minesweeper in the terminal with Ratatui @ [2025-02-05 Wed 18:01] :@someday:

And then I capture it in a daily note (or very rarely refile it) that has an org-id. Then everything gets connected with links and backlinks.

I keep the usual CREATED in the properties drawer empty in case I want to turn that heading into a node for linking at some point.

Though I'm still figuring out some things about my approach as I go. One thing is clear, org-mode can be adapted to quite a lot of workflows regardless of their weirdness or efficacy.

My org capture template from bernt Hanson's website clocks in and out giving you a timestamp. There is a "note" capture type.

https://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html

Git gives you a full history of changes which is convenient for many other reasons. I also do sometimes put dated and less often timestamped entries when desired.

Of course, all the chat apps that allow sending messages to yourself come with free time stamps.

I use this feature on Slack at the least.

In a google workspace you used to be able to create a conversation or whatever they call it, not invite anyone and bam! notes to self. But I think they disabled it now and they don't let you create a new chat if it doesn't have at least 2 people. Might be able to work around it by inviting someone and then kicking them out, I haven't tried.

Before collaborative docs we used to take usability study notes in a group chat; the timestamps were an unexpected but nice bonus.

Whoa cool! I built a bespoke tool eerily similar to this several years ago as an intern at Johnson Space Center for logging mission communications. I’ve wished I had something like it for meeting notes every time since then. I’ll be giving it a try ;)

great to hear! logging communications is my main use-case for this, let me know what you think

Notepad does the same using the F5 key. But this one has a nicer interface.

I love that you made it so simple to use!

I've started building a similar app before, except with more of a focus on the timestamps than the text (prioritizing time tracking over note taking). I ended up switching gears to different side projects and never came back to this one.

That being said, a feature I'd begun to implement that you could consider adding is what I called Context Tags. It looks like in Notetime tags are applied to notes to provide better organization. Context tags in contrast would be applied to timestamped lines within the note. When moving to the next line, the new one would default to having the same context tags.

That's it! That's the whole feature. This let's a user tag the first line in a category, such as "work" or "project A", then gain that categorization for any subsequent lines (until the user specified a new category).

that's an interesting approach this implies that the context can change from one subject to the other within a single note? is that a useful use-case to you?

Timestamped notes/lines are great, I've had these in my .vimrc for years

  "insert date
  iabbrev <expr> dts strftime("\* %D - %A\n\t")
  "insert datetime
  iabbrev <expr> dtt strftime("%D %H:%M:%S:")

For the uneducated, how do you use those? Is there a way to insert those automatically, just like the submission does?

I got it. One enters `dtt`, or `dts` and space. It gets replaced by date, or timestamp accordingly. Pretty neat!

Those are basically string-replacements. Add those lines to .vim/vimrc, and when you type "dtt" or "dts" that text gets replaced with a time/date stamp.

Kinda useful if you want to manually add date/time to lines, but a different thing.

Might be mild autism or some other mental condition, but I'm obsessive about timestamping everything. In my defense, it is useful when you want to refer back to it! Looks like a great little app

Timestamps are very underrated. There's so much useful information stored in them. It can help you remember what other things you did that day around that time, in what order some events happened, what were your initial plans and how they changed. These things can be so easily forgotten.

Exactly! It helps me reconstruct my train of thought and the chain of events, even after a long time has passed.

I share your obsession I even planned a search-by-timestamp feature, and then scrapped it because I thought that its too weird and who-does-this

I've dedicated Sublime Text specifically for my development notes. I use a single folder in my home directory for all these notes. Every new tab gets a timestamped name and this directory assigned (Yes, my sublime's default behaviour is now this), so if I save it, it goes there.

I also have a shortcut to save all files at once, which is great because I end up with a lot open by the end of the day.

It helps keeping track of info I might need later, like backups, text transformations, optimizing DB queries, curl calls, less important passwords, refining emails with LLMs, drafting prompts, etc.

I love how fast my workflow is now: just switch to sublime, open a new tab, type away, and hit `CMD + Y` to save all at the end of the day or week.

For lookup: Mostly, I remember a few keywords and search across files. They're timestamped, so they're sorted in the sidebar (e.g., `2025-03-20_11-02-15-77dee966.txt`).

Shoutout to Odatnurd, who helped me code the plugin and live-streamed it (link in the forum): https://forum.sublimetext.com/t/how-to-auto-save-unsaved-tab....

Things I wish I had:

1. Structure (A scrollable view, with expandable notes, date range picker, better search)

3. Encrypted backups

I find that there are different kinds of ways in which I think of notes (or note types):

1. Dev notes (scratchpad)

2. Thoughts and logs (don't lose it, when did that happen)

3. Long notes we study/review (lecture notes, obsidian)

I feel Notetime is great for [2]. It's a great idea for building a similar sublime plugin.

I'm just getting a blank page on Firefox and a few of these errors in the inspector output:

  Uncaught SecurityError: Security error when calling GetDirectory

It does work on Chromium. And it looks nice. I wish it had keyboard navigation though, which it doesn't seem to have yet, so I can quickly correct a previous entry.

thanks! can you tell me the Firefox version? keyboard navigation is a great idea, didn't think of it since I mostly use this on mobile.

This idea feels a little like bullet journaling or logseq [0] to me. For what it's worth, I do this in Obsidian and clean-up my thoughts on a regular basis. It hits the right balance of minimalism and usefulness for me.

0: https://logseq.com/

I tried to create more of a apple-notes type of app, but I get the appeal in full featured apps like Obsidian and logseq

Let me ask a random note-taking question.

I am a heavy user of Roam ( before that workflowy, before that org mode). I have daily checklists, but also some extensive notes on specific topics and some large projects I'm tracking.

But I'm so heavily using LLMs now to help with researching topics. And I haven't found a good way to bring my LLM usage to my note taking.

I'd love to be able to go over some things with an LLM and then tell it to add a summary of this to document X on topic Y.

Does anyone have a workflow that combines LLMs and Deep Research with a note-taking system? I'm wondering about just using Obsidian with Windsurf to make changes to it in an agent type manner.

Two QOL uses I've found is concept indexing and excerpt formatting.

Before/after engaging with new material, I'd generate a table of concepts and the pages these concepts are mentioned. Simple two column markdown table, nothing more.

Second, for excerpt formatting I use a specific markdown format (add timestamp header, page number, and one/two keywords) to convert my highlights after running through a PDF.

A more advanced use case is extracting the bibliography and building an inverted index of where each citation is mentioned (page numbers/paragraphs). You can then compute all sorts of concordances: which authors are referenced on the same page, what concepts are related, which authors/concepts are over/underrepresented, and so on.

Very cool.

What note taking software are you using? Or just text files?

Did you try obsidian plugins for this?

I would love an option to easily export these, both in bulk and as individual notes. That way I can share them, feed them into software (i.e. AI to summarise) etc.

Maybe it's somewhere in the docs, but I can't find it easily in the mobile app

thanks! no export yet since I wasn't sure how it would look like what kind of export formats are you interested in?

Looks awesome! Was thinking about building it for myself. One note: the delete function is not working apparently: it shows a note is deleted, but it appears again after reload.

thanks, good catch! I'll fix that.

Needs the "Show HN:" tag since the submitter is the creator.

Also the submitter is here to answer questions, but their message is buried.

- - -

I wonder if it would be better to have a pinned message for Show HN threads. E.g. there could be a /submitshow page, which explains the Show HN process and best practices, and allows the submitter to create an explanation/AMA pinned post at submission time.

thanks for that! new to this platform and when I created the post, it asked for a url and text which I thought will be shown together (like reddit), and now I can't find my own comment :)

Nice.

I'm using a simple little combo of a shell script and alias to append a line of text to a text file in a known location. The script is just to prepend the line with a timestamp. Stupid and simple, but hey, it works for me.

My aliases:

  alias ttag='/cygdrive/c/Dropbox/tools/ttag/ttag.sh'
  alias ttagcat='\cat /cygdrive/c/Dropbox/tools/ttag/ttag-logfile.txt'
  alias ttago='open /cygdrive/c/Dropbox/tools/ttag/ttag-logfile.txt'

The shellscript:

  1   │ LOGFILE=/cygdrive/c/Dropbox/tools/ttag/ttag-logfile.txt
  2   │ TIMESTAMP_NICE=$(date +"%F %H.%M.%S - %s:")
  3   │ echo $TIMESTAMP_NICE "$@" >> $LOGFILE

Interesting.

I have almost the same workflow with https://getdrafts.com/ where I only take short notes and I have custom action which sets the creation date+time of the note as its first line. But, having a separate entry for each line is the next level of this approach.

I have explained this idea to a friend just a couple months back! Thanks for building it, and with such polish.

might making it open source so people can help you with implementing the suggested thing in your reddit thread?

what suggested thing are you referring to? probably will open this once I un-embarassify the code :)

I like it and have been using 2 days. I don't understand one thing: Does the thread number increase or is it only one thread. I mean the notes are going down forever even if the day changes. Congrats btw

what do you mean by thread number?

the notes will always add at the bottom

Did you expect a different behavior?

Nice idea and really polished look.

Nit: clicking "Create X" to add a new tag seems worse than pressing enter to create one as you have to go off the tag menu and back onto it to create or add another, but it's not necessarily clear that you can press enter to create one.

that's a great suggestion

how do you think we can make it more obvious?

Lots of people are posting their custom solutions using org-mode, cli tools, vim, etc. There’s a wide world of people out there who don’t customize their environments, and therefore miss out on great improvements to their lives. Let’s make tools for them!

Create a "karpathy" mode that flips the order and tag him.. See https://x.com/karpathy/status/1902503837971443895

nice! I tagged him, I hope he'll notice :)

Made a iOS Shortcuts implementation: https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/2f43a044f7b5478f92fa4506d8a...

Might be useful for someone.

This is pretty neat! Is font formatting allowed/possible in shortcuts? Would love the timestamp to be on a mono font! Tried fiddling with it, but haven't been able to figured it out.

Not with Apple Notes I’m afraid, as there is no inline code formatting.

But generally yes, you can use the “Rich text from markdown” action and then pass the output to Notes.

Nice job! Just noticed—when an item is edited, the edited timestamp isn’t being captured.

This is probably intentional -- if you want to fix a typo or make something clearer that you've already captured you likely want to preserve the original timestamp?

If you want an entry timestamped to your current time, you can make a new entry.

probably, i wonder if there shouldn't be an edited timestamp as well

this is the answer :) fixing errors should not alter the timeline I assumed that editing timestamps is also quite problematic since it will break the chronological order of the note

I really don't get how this can't be emulated with the F5 key, or something like Sublime Text's InsertDate package, or a text expansion software. What does this note taking provide that's any different?

Yeah, this seems like an Obsidian package waiting to happen.

Obsidian already has this, super-D for date, super-T for time, trivial to add inline as you go, if using a single-note approach. And any new note automatically captures its time of creation and last-edited time.

That you might end up having to pay for it and have your notes taken hostage.

having to hit an extra key and miss out on cross-device syncing sound like two great reasons to not emulate this in anything else

the approach here was to combine the simplicity of apple notes, working across devices, with the automatic time-stamping found in the desktop ecosystem of tools.

Obsidian/SublimeText users are probably not the target audience for this :)

I see a lot of people mentioning how easy it is to add a timestamp using a shortcut or git blame, but that overhead could kills note-taking. Both writing and lookup/review should be extremely fast.

This is really sleek. I like the focus on minimalism since what I often need is a simple interface to take down quick notes, thoughts, and ideas. Any plans to offer a self-hosted version?

Thanks for the warm feedback! I see that self hosting is a popular request so I'll start planning it :)

That's great to hear! Hope to see an update on HN when the self-hosted version is ready.

This is a delightful app. Thank you for sharing! I like the user experience. I don't need to do anything except for write and press enter when I want to create a new line of text.

As someone who works as an indie contractor and bills hourly, I have been wanting something like this for an eternity. Looks pretty cool and will take it for a spin.

if you really got into the habit of putting your train of thought in here i was thinking you could use it for billing hours/dividing up billable hours

that is exactly the tool I want. i just want to cache-out my brain 24x7 so that I can replay it later on and figure out what I was actually doing all day.

The timestamp on each line gets recorded when return is entered. Is there a way to record the timestamp on when the line started instead? Maybe make it configurable?

nice idea, but this can make you start a new line and go back to it after a while, making it refer to a stale date?

Oh yes, journaling. Without accounts, and no export. I can't live without my weekly timestamped notes. org-journal does that for the emacs brethren.

not sure if you are sarcastic or not :) but export is planned next

Woah, nice work. I would have loved this for taking interview notes. I didn't know I wanted this.

Windows notepad has this feature. Press F5 key each time you want to insert timestamp.

The Terms and Privacy Policy links at the bottom don't go anywhere.

thanks, an oversight, I'll fix it

Love this, an option to export the note as a txt file would be amazing.

I agree; being able to export is super important for keeping records, and it's definitely my top request. Having a local app instead of a web app would be great too.

thanks! by local you mean a mac/windows app? that would be a major endeavour :)

thanks! is txt format enough? initially thought of csv, since its a 2 column structure

Nice work! Is it possible to hide the seconds?

Btw, F5 in Notepad inserts a time stamp.

hiding the seconds is a great idea, I'll add a minute/second granularity option

Heads-up: the terms and privacy policy links are broken.

Glad you wrote what was only an idea in my mind :)

Simple but effective idea. Is it open source?

no, but I see it's a popular request, a bit embarrassed by how the code looks :) I never planned to release it

Are you planning to also develop a mobile app?

Thank you for sharing this one. I love it.

What’s the tech stack like?

its a 100% client-side react app, there are no server requests except from the first one creating the anonymous user. the local DB is SQLite implementation that supports offline mode and cloud sync (not enabled in this version)

It does not do images.

Images aren't notes.

They are.

timestamping content that is not text is on my list, was too complicated for an MVP which I wasn't sure someone would even want :)

Cool project

Awesome @goheberg

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