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Comment by Wilya | Hacker News Reader

Plain text files in a synced directory (I use sparkleshare, but any dropbox-like system will do the trick).

I tried many, cloud apps, desktop apps, wikis. But in the end, I was never comfortable with putting all my thoughts in documents in a weird format (at best) or in the cloud (at worst). And most apps didn't offer any huge advantage to compensate for that.

I have backups of my notes folder. I can grep through it when I'm looking for something. I can edit it from any computer. And I know it will still be readable in 10 years.

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I can attest to this, having gone through pretty much the same cycle of apps and wikis. Finally settled on plain text files with cloud sync. Except I use a bit of YAML to give the material some structure.

But I use this to write down things I would consider more 'information' than 'knowledge'. If it's a new cloud app I found on HN that I might need later, I write it down. If I learned something new (for example, I recently learned about phage therapy as an alternative to antibiotics), I resist the temptation and try to integrate it into my existing body of knowledge. In my opinion, if you have a 'fact' that needs to be memorized, then it is either a bit of arbitrary information or it is not yet tethered to the rest of your knowledge and is therefore banging around in your head. I usually find a link to nail it down. I wouldn't exactly call it a 'memory palace' but it's sort of like that.

This is the exact same thing I do. In fact I wrote a little shell script (https://github.com/rmcastil/dotfiles/blob/master/bin/gtd) that I use once a day to get everything organized. It opens up all the files in vim so that I can quickly organize what I'll handle for the given day. When I'm in my shell and think of another task I run another script (https://github.com/rmcastil/dotfiles/blob/master/bin/inbox) that quickly appends it to my todo list. I try to loosely follow the GTD methodology.

People ask me where many of the references come from for my Hacker News comments, and besides the links I look up on the spot, most come from a text file I keep open all day in my text editor. For other writing projects, I have a lot of other text files. Now that text files recognize Unicode, I am very happy with a simple approach to storing information.

I use the same approach and for the same reasons. Though, now I've started to experiment with markdown.

Did you have a look at org-mode?

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