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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

#311

Post by racingmars »

herpderperator wrote: post #304
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,…

Be careful about making a file like that -- one where you have to write the entire contents back to disk when you update it even though you only modified the last line or so -- too large. You're definitely better off splitting to give you more chances at not losing everything in the event that it gets corrupted. But I guess proper backups would also take care of that.

Often the "single text file" organization method is used along with a source control system like git to synchronize the file between different devices. So that helps with the backup/recovery aspect too.

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

#312

Post by timothy-quinn »

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,…

That was the ethos behind the app I wrote, https://screwnotes.com - I just wanted a note taking tool that syncs everywhere and I there's only one way to add items. I don't want to wait for a product to load, or to have to make any mental decisions about organisation, due dates, or relationships between items.

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

#313

Post by pssdbt »

bdamm wrote: post #301
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,…

Mine; the filename is today's date: alias notes='nvim echo ~/notes/notes-$(date +'%Y%m%d').md' The format being markdown gives a good syntax clue to vim.

I'm similar, but with vimwiki. -w--w will open an entry for today's date, so for me ~/vimwiki/diary/2020-02-08.md. `-w i` will show a list of all entries. Pretty convenient stuff. I have mine start with a template as well, with a few common headers.

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

#316

Post by tomerbd »

Question: about "There's no running "todo" list with items that keep pushed back day after day" - but what if you have items that you don't manage to do, and they accumulate, example of such low priority items: pause car licence (nothing bad will happen if you don't), cancel some subscription, let's say you have many of those, where do you put them and how do you avoid this growing list? let's say every day I manage to do one such low priority item but I have two new to do etc.

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

#317

Post by Frazzydee »

tomerbd wrote: post #316

Question: about "There's no running "todo" list with items that keep pushed back day after day" - but what if you have items that you don't manage to do, and they accumulate, example of such low priority items: pause car licence (nothing bad will happen if you don't), cancel some subscription, let's say you have many of those, where do you put them and how do you avoid this growing list? let's say every day I manage…

Those kind of tasks would go in the online calendar, scheduled on some future date.

> The one outside tool I use is an online calendar, and I put everything on this calendar, even things that aren't actually for a fixed time like "make a coffee table at the workshop" or "figure out how to recruit new PhD students" — I'll schedule them on a date when I want to think about it. That way all my future plans and schedule are together, and not a bunch of lists I have to keep track of.

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

#318

Post by lkrubner »

I do this too, since 2005. Part of the reason I do this was because between 1995 and 2005 I experimented with a bunch of different software, and the software kept being deprecated. I forget a lot of the software that existed at the time. I used a bunch of early web apps, in the 1990s, all of which disappeared, and I used some interesting experiments with desktop productivity apps, all of which were discontinued, and I used a 5 or 6 different PDAs (this was in the era before the smart phone, when cell phones were dumb and we used PDAs to take notes) all of which were abandoned by the companies that were selling them (most of them were pushed by hardware companies that had no strategy for building important software that would survive over time).

Having been burned, many, many times, trying apps and formats that all were abandoned, I eventually realized that the only thing that would definitely last, over the long term, was a simple text file. The simpler the better. Simple is the only guarantee that something will last. Unix text files have not changed much since 1970s, it is the only thing in the tech world that has demonstrated longevity.

So I stick with a simple text file, and I will do so till the day I die.

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

#319

Post by TeMPOraL »

d0mine wrote: post #300
aidos wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, you can use scp as a protocol?!

Emacs' Tramp supports multiple protocols https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/tramp/Qu... For example, to run a remote command using an inline org-mode source block: src_sh[:dir /ssh:host:]{some command} Or to run code using a remote Jupyter kernel within Org-mode in Emacs: #+BEGIN_SRC jupyter-julia :session /ssh:ec2:/run/user/1000/jupyter/kernel-julia-0.6.json ... #+END_SRC https://github.com/dzop/ema…

Oh, that remote execution is a neat trick. Thanks!

To cover the more trivial point for the non-Emacs readers: Tramp in Emacs makes it so that there's almost no difference between opening a file (C-x C-f) like this:

  /home/user/some-file.txt
and like this:

  /ssh:some-machine:/home/user/some-file.txt
and like this, if you need superuser rights:

  /ssh:some-machine|sudo:some-machine:/etc/someconfig
The subsystem in Emacs called Tramp makes this almost transparent; you edit your remote files as if they were local. There are occasional kinks with path translation in corner-case situations, like local Emacs editing remote source files and trying to load them into remote REPL, but those are rare and can be configured away. Dired (directory manager in Emacs) also works transparently over Tramp, so this essentially replaces SCP and graphical SFTP tools for me. You can even run GDB remotely over Tramp, which is a nice trick.

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

#320

Post by lazyjeff »

jstummbillig wrote: post #213

Where/How would I jot down a brand new todo? The way I understand it right now is, that everything is immediately being scheduled into an appropriate calendar spot, but that seems so very wrong that I feel I must be mistaken. (To elaborate: To me it is critical to have swift todo entry with minimal effort to account for the random and probably inconvenient times new tasks and thoughts pop up. Having to also deal with…

Original author here. Yeah it feels wrong because you're not using the calendar like it's "supposed to" be used. But who cares. But what this does is 1) reduce the stress of seeing that item day after day until the day when you asked yourself to deal with it, and 2) forces you to find a day to put it when you have available time for it.
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