To me the major takeaways from the popularity of this post/discussion:
* Modern productivity software is still severely inadequate
* No matter how good your system is, the affordance to drop into plain text is key for the dev market
My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file
361–370 of 420 posts
Re: My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file
#362Earlier quoted context omitted.
But then you've only got it locally. The advantage to VCS is that you can trivially have it on multiple machines (desktop, laptop, android with termux). You can even do it between your own machines via ssh if you don't like "cloud" stuff.
Using syncthing you can trivially have it everywhere as well, with only a one-time setup and no continuous need to manually commit changes and manually sync them (unless you're using hooks for your VCS to automate that I guess).
I use syncthing for non-text files, but I keep getting conflict copies. I could probably fix that by having one node always online, but text+VCS means that conflict resolution is built in.
Re: My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file
#363I 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,…
> it cracks open Emacs on the notes file, adds a timestamp, appends the optional text, and then I can just type or paste something in.
Do you do that with a shell script or an elisp function? Either way, I'd be interested in taking a look at your implementation if you don't mind sharing.
Re: My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file
#364Earlier quoted context omitted.
That sounds quite elegant, but seems this is only possible if you work out of a single machine almost always. Perhaps it could be made into a service? As long as explicit effort is taken that there's absolute minimum extra effort as possible!
I handle this by aliasing `todo` to `vim scp://[my website]/~/todo.txt`.
I've found that VIM 8's SCP does not support absolute or realpaths like SCP generally does. Thus to access the remote file at foo:/home/dotan/todo.txt or foo:~/todo.txt I would have to use `vim scp://dotan@foo/todo.txt`. Just a heads-up for anybody who wishes to try this.
Re: My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file
#365Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The data loss was attributed to scaling problems. They've recently seen a large spike in usage, presumably in part from attention on HN.
They're hiring (Clojure): https://angel.co/company/roam-research/jobs/718960-full-stac...
Re: My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file
#366I found FreeMind (a mind-mapping program) back before 2011, and have been using it as both a daily task tracking system as well as for project planning, and task mapping. I have introduced many people to FreeMind, and the interesting thing is that the numbers have not changed over nearly 10 years: - 50% hate it and cannot grok it - 50% love it and have used it every day since (link: http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wi…
FreeMind is pretty nice but indeed quite niche.
Mindmeister is a good alternative for collaboration, it's modern and even has a freemium plan. (But of course vendor lock-in and less features...)
Re: My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file
#367I 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'll toss in my setup too, which I started semi-recently and has been working well: In my .bash_profile I essentially just `open --background -e "...$(date +%F).txt" &`. Since I'm in the CLI daily for work, I get day-stamped files passively opened without having to think about it. It's a nice quiet reminder to keep notes throughout the day, and it all just goes into a folder in dropbox that I can trivially `grep` or…
I REALLY like this bash idea! Thanks!
Re: My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file
#368I know how to work with org-mode and I’ve also tried the paper notebook. Both seem like they should be working fine, my problem is that I never remember to work on my notes or todos. The last entries are likely at least a few months old. Typically I just want to start with whatever comes next, I probably already have a plan in my head and it doesn’t occur to me to write something down after I’m done. My workdays vary…
Do you clock your time in org-mode? I find that helps me keep todos up to date even if I am working tasks based on an informal plan only in my mind.
Re: My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file
#369I 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,…
This is the best thing I’ve ever read. The answer has been right in front of my eyes. I’ve been searching for a good note/things to know/knowledge storage app for decades. And a single text file seems like the best option. I’ve already started transferring stuff today to a text file.
Re: My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file
#370My text file just turned 21 :) I tried various automation things, org mode, scripts, markup for time spent (so I can automate timesheets, ugh) but none of it stuck. org mode in particular is like a straitjacket with the indentation rules. So text file it is. I do keep command lines in it occasionally but ever since I started using eternal bash history that I version control I stopped recording those separately very m…
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?
I push every unique command that I type into a database and bind Ctrl-R to peco querying the 10k commands. I'm amazed it did not occur to me earlier. All of my systems have access to the same shared history, which greatly simplifies multi window and multi computer operations.