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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

#401

Post by fadhlika »

kajmagnusmobile wrote: post #374
tdhttt wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just implemented something very similar last week! I store the note in a Raspberry Pi which I can access anywhere. Also with iOS shortcut, I can easily send note to my Pi from my iPhone's clipboard.

How can you access the Pi when you are not at home? It has a static IP? I've been thinking about this approach .. but was unsure about how access from outside, or if I'm abroad even.

for selfhosted stuff, usually use VPN connected to home IP address using Dynamic DNS

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

#402

Post by tugberkk »

I use a website for recording stuff. That website enables me to create a title, and write into it everything as a post with a timestamp.

For example, "health" is a title. I can dump everything in that page and read it later on. "Payments" is another title, etc. I believe this to be the best solution for me, because I can reach this site from my mobile phone too.

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

#403

Post by mr_gibbins »

I'm the same. It drives my employer crazy, they want me to use JIRA and I use Notepad, and guess which requires less maintenance? I do use a couple of external tools though - Trello in particular, and Google Sheets to keep a basic external calendar where people can book appointments in slots that I provide (rather than an open calendar). That's it. It works perfectly.

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

#404

Post by rakoo »

kabdib wrote: post #173
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.

Absurdly, comically simple is the way to go. In these situations I usually just send myself an email, or write something down in the current physical notebook. About 20 years ago I spent a while writing a server to do a bunch of automation and reminding and so forth, and found that I was spending more time on that thing than I was doing real work, so I ditched it, just like I did OneNote and all the other apps. There…

You're making me think that the even absurder method is to use mail drafts as your files. Everything is synced between all your devices, you have built-in modification date, a full editor in the web version or applications for a more integrated experience, high portability and backup (transferring from IMAP account to IMAP account is easy), labels and/or folders depending on your provider, efficient search, attachments...

Actually in the past I used my email account as my RSS reader. It had integrated read/non read status, mass "mark as read" as needed, was synced on all platforms I cared about without anything to install. I didn't really changed my subscriptions a lot so configuration was not complicated.

Sometimes a webmail is just a good enough UI for text-related things.

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

#405

Post by kajmagnusmobile »

fadhlika wrote: post #401
kajmagnusmobile wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you access the Pi when you are not at home? It has a static IP? I've been thinking about this approach .. but was unsure about how access from outside, or if I'm abroad even.

for selfhosted stuff, usually use VPN connected to home IP address using Dynamic DNS

Thanks, any special dynamic dns provider you like?

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

#406

Post by piascikj »

I use https://imdone.io

A simple cmd+shift+j takes me to my daily journal markdown file in vscode. Everything is markdown and my tasks look something like this...

  # [Read hacker news post](#TODO:)
  - [My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file | Hacker News](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22276184)
  - [ ] Leave a comment with my setup
These appear as cards in the imdone board.

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

#407

Post by [deleted] »

progman32 wrote: post #396
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,…

Was inspired by this, threw together this hack for vim users. #! /usr/bin/env bash cd ~/share # or wherever echo >> notes.txt date >> notes.txt if [[ $# -ne 0 ]]; then echo $@ >> notes.txt fi vim "+normal Go" +startinsert notes.txt Enough to see if this will work for me. I also aliased this to something short so I can quickly view notes starting at the bottom: vim "+normal G" ~/share/notes.txt

[deleted]

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

#408

Post by ernie24 »

progman32 wrote: post #396
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,…

Was inspired by this, threw together this hack for vim users. #! /usr/bin/env bash cd ~/share # or wherever echo >> notes.txt date >> notes.txt if [[ $# -ne 0 ]]; then echo $@ >> notes.txt fi vim "+normal Go" +startinsert notes.txt Enough to see if this will work for me. I also aliased this to something short so I can quickly view notes starting at the bottom: vim "+normal G" ~/share/notes.txt

I also would like to use something similar but I wish to add new text on the top of the file (so oldest notes go to the bottom). I ended with something like this:

    nvim  -c "+normal ggO# $(date)" -c ':s/$/\r/' -c 'se nohlsearch' notes.md
Would be interested in knowing if I can make this nicer/more efficient.

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

#409

Post by supenguin »

Having EVERYTHING in one big text file would scare me a bit. I've been using the open source app Joplin which lets you take notes in Markdown and am leaning toward one folder per month and taking individual plain text notes there.

The metadata is in a database but the notes themselves are all plain markdown. If something bad ever happens to Joplin, I can just dump the .md files to a folder and move to something else.

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

#410

Post by supenguin »

beastcoast wrote: post #115

I’ve found OneNote very useful for Todo lists. It’s very flexible and supports collapsible nested lists. But the killer feature is the “dock to desktop” feature, which makes the list always visible on my monitor. It forces me to stay on task and reminds me what to do next. I create a new page every week and copy over my remaining tasks from the last week. I’ve been doing this for 3 years now and haven’t looked back.

I use OneNote at work. It's the one Microsoft product I really enjoy using. It does so much and lets you organize things any which way you want. It is about as close as I've seen to digital paper.

Granted, I haven't had to do sketches in there, or any kind of OCR. I think I'd still do those on paper.

I've got one folder per project and one folder for each thing I want to learn.

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