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My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file

jeffhuang.com

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Re: My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file

#181

Post by hanche »

gorgoiler wrote: post #140
lostlogin wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m in your camp. Apple Notes somehow fell into this gap for me. For me the ability to format, add images and screenshots and easily share gave it an edge over plain text.

I loved notes for years but switched to Bear in the last few months in order to get sane Markdown export. I couldn’t ever find a nice way of exporting (and backing up) my Notes notes. There was an IMAP storage option but that meant losing formatting options.

I have been using FSNotes for the past year, but feel ready for something more polished; so now I am trying Bear. Thanks for the tip!

Did you look at FSNotes before switching to Bear yorself?

My own note taking is too fragmented right now, being split between org mode, FSNotes, and Apple Notes. It’s a bit like having clothing with too many pockets: I am too often unsure where to look for a particular note.

Re: My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file

#183

Post by rsync »

entilzha wrote: post #164
kabdib wrote: post #109

I use a single text file, have done this for decades. I dump everything into it and don't worry too much about structure, it's an incredible resource for "remembering" minutia, things like "what was that server that i thought might have had some issues last August?" Just a quick control-S and I'm there. My current 7+ year old notes file has about 100K lines in it right now. I can tell you what I was doing last year,…

Any thoughts on how to access/modify on mobile without making it too cumbersome? I often think about todo on walk/train, but could see making it a computer only thing.

Set up an email alias that cats (appends) your note to your org file.

Then, just send your notes (via sms) to the email.

Re: My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file

#184

Post by _y5hn »

What people don't know or forget: You can always start minimally. For personal projects, it turns out a text file works for 99% of use cases. Text editor, vi or emacs? Doesn't matter, as long as it's just text! You can have more text files for different stuff. Invent ways to use flags, prioritize, assignments, etc. It's your ad-hoc format, and easy to evolve. Heck, for personal hobby, I've had success with such TODO-lists at end of such sourcecode.

For more structure, I've found Freemind cool to use. It works like a text-file, but you put everything in a graph and can spread through different files. Can even use links, colors and text formats if you like.

What doesn't really work, is other people's tools, like so-called collaborative tools, SM, and whatnot. One day they'll just delete everything, migrations will fail, it's slow and unreliable. Email seems to work well enough personally, though less so with the advent of "cloud computing" (other people's computer).

Re: My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file

#185

Post by krzyk »

aeontech wrote: post #97
numbers wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you say “eternal bash history” how long is that? I thought after some large number it becomes very slow. I’d like to try this if you don’t mind sharing how you did that?

Not parent poster, but I use zsh-histdb [0] to keep my history in an SQLite database. There is also Historian [1] for bash, and a bunch of other suggestions in the discussion thread on it on HN [2] [0]: https://github.com/larkery/zsh-histdb [1]: https://undertitled.com/2017/04/12/historian-because-please-... [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14103688

> Not parent poster, but I use zsh-histdb [0] to keep my history in an SQLite database

Why? A file is easier to grep (even if you have to pass `-a` to it after the file starts to be in the MBs, right now it is 7.4MB). I love having eternal command history in my zsh, and I wonder if I miss something out by not using SQLite for this.

Re: My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file

#186

Post by zgit »

jwtorres wrote: post #175
kabdib wrote: post #109

I use a single text file, have done this for decades. I dump everything into it and don't worry too much about structure, it's an incredible resource for "remembering" minutia, things like "what was that server that i thought might have had some issues last August?" Just a quick control-S and I'm there. My current 7+ year old notes file has about 100K lines in it right now. I can tell you what I was doing last year,…

Funny that we all resort to the same things. I have an almost identical bash script that appends and timestamps each note, but I push it to my Dropbox account using their REST APIs instead of my local file system.

Can you expand on your system a little bit? Do you use it from the phone too?

Re: My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file

#188

Post by war1025 »

kabdib wrote: post #109

I use a single text file, have done this for decades. I dump everything into it and don't worry too much about structure, it's an incredible resource for "remembering" minutia, things like "what was that server that i thought might have had some issues last August?" Just a quick control-S and I'm there. My current 7+ year old notes file has about 100K lines in it right now. I can tell you what I was doing last year,…

I've been doing something similar to track what I do at work for just over a year. I tried keeping a home journal with a similar technique, but it didn't stick.

I have a git repo set up, and I run: "vim `date -I`", which opens a text file named for the current date (2020-02-08 today for example). Then I'll put in notes about what it is I'm currently working on.

I've come up with the convention of separating tasks with three equal signs (===) and separating updates to a single task with (--).

The main thing it's been helpful for to me, which is honestly probably why I've kept up with it, is that I'm bad about doing my daily timesheets. So once a month when our accounting lady gets after me, I'll go back through my notes and fill everything in.

Re: My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file

#189

Post by randomdude402 »

twodave wrote: post #31

I’ve never really gotten into “productivity” apps. Typically my email inbox and calendar combine as my to-do list. Anything in the main inbox still needs to be dealt with. Anything else shows up as a reminder when I need it to. Literally everything work related lives in 1-2 work applications. I intentionally don’t integrate those with my home life. Sometimes I’ll keep a scratch note open in VS code but rarely do I sa…

I used to have an Evernote account with work notes and home notes, and found it impossible to not sometimes be distracted by the work notes outside of work.

Now I keep anything note-like completely separate. Every once in a while I send a specific thing from one world to the other, like additions I come up with for dotfiles, but otherwise it's so much better keeping things separate.

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