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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

#351

Post by supersrdjan »

pssdbt wrote: post #313
bdamm wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I do this too but this article makes me think that it may be better if everything u was one file folding avoids visual clutter anyway

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

#352

Post by supersrdjan »

alpaca128 wrote: post #90
supersrdjan wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I retired Evernote when I discovered Vimwiki. I keep wondering, though, am I shortchanging myself by not using org. mode? But I don't know emacs and I am not sure whether it makes sense to make such a costly transition.

Depends. For just checklists org-mode is overkill, I use a few custom shortcuts in Vim for that. But org-mode also has a couple additional features like time tracking and a way to generate summarised tables based on that tracking, or the agenda. Either way learning Emacs just for org-mode is probably only a good idea if you really want to use the features coming with it in one package.

That's appealing. I have been tracking my time in toggl for years.

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

#353

Post by asadkn »

Did this for 15 years. Todos, notes, any list goes in a plain text file.

It was all good but not aesthetically pleasing in terms of readability (wonder if Text Editors will ever focus on improving leading and tracking, or better fonts). And lack of other visual goodies like easy columns.

Tried almost all todo apps and the lack of flexibility was always annoying. I wanted the flexibility of a text editor - an enhanced text editor.

Last year, I discovered Notion and have never looked back. I use it for everything. It's not perfect, but it's pretty close to what I've always wanted.

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

#357

Post by justusthane »

bachmeier wrote: post #167
entilzha wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you version control it using Fossil, and it's in markdown, you can access it directly from the repo website.

You can with Github as well. And make changes to it via the website. Not on mobile though, unless you switch to the desktop site.

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

#358

Post by kabdib »

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.

The "safe save" protocols that editors usually use to write file contents are pretty good. I've never worried about this and I've never lost a file to a mis-save, not in decades.

I don't think it's a concern. And you need to make backups anyway.

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

#359

Post by the_white_oak »

war1025 wrote: post #292
grifball wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use vim. Doing files based on timestamps sounds smart so I might steal that. I used just one big file right now and one thing good about it is that you can search all your notes with one command. I also use the uuid command to tag/reference sections. Then, I can just put the cursor on the uuid and hit '*' to jump right to that spot in the file.

Had never used `*` before. Turns out it's search for the word under the cursor. Handy. I guess that's basically what you wrote, but I had to play with it a bit to understand.

A bit of a tip: while `*` is a search for a word onward, `#` is a reverse -- a search for a word backwards. Might help sometimes

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

#360

Post by chrisweekly »

runxel wrote: post #271
chrisweekly wrote: post #170

There's beauty and power in simplicity. Thanks for sharing! Also, take a look at Roam ( https://roamresearch.com ) which almost comes full-circle to a place of simplicity (just write instead of worrying about where to put things or how to organize them) while providing all kinds of benefits. There are many tradeoffs and valid reasons to prefer your .txt (or my .md) file(s), but I highly recommend playing w Roam to se…

Roam is totally cool, but at the moment not very polished. Even worse they're loosing a lot of data, which stopped me from using it – sadly. I still think it's superior to anything else, but loosing data is a show stopper.

Huh. I have a list of things I feel it needs before it's really ready for broad adoption, but data loss? I haven't experienced any, and yours is the first mention I've come across. That said, it's still beta quality and they're moving really fast; since it's still free I'm reserving judgment on the reliability front. It's so good, w so much potential; rooting hard for them to get it right.
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