How I Manage My Random Daily Notes • Hacker News Board

Re: How I Manage My Random Daily Notes

#21

Post by asdff » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 8:00 AM UTC

herodoturtle wrote: post #2

I've built a similar system from scratch - also using this Dropbox daily notes file technique - except my script generates folders and sub folders for each year (YYYY) and each month within each year (YYY-MM) whenever I instantiate a file on a certain day. Makes long term management much easier than having thousands of files in one folder. Same grep principles apply (and I use hashtags within my notes to track keywor…

Why even break it down? If you are using grep and presumably editors that can go to a pattern anyway you might as well write to a single file.

Re: How I Manage My Random Daily Notes

#22

Post by ekianjo » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 8:04 AM UTC

I guess the author has never heard of vim-wiki?

> The way it works is that every time I run the script, it opens the note for that day in my editor of choice

vimwiki's diary function does that for you under the hood.

Re: How I Manage My Random Daily Notes

#23

Post by jareware » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 8:04 AM UTC

I feel like Joplin (https://joplinapp.org/) should also get mentioned: storing notes in plain Markdown files, optionally synced via e.g. Dropbox. Bonus points for also having mobile apps that sync with the same backend.

Re: How I Manage My Random Daily Notes

#24

Post by octoberfranklin » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 8:04 AM UTC

vim with folding

Still the best tree editor I've found. I left emacs for it!

Re: How I Manage My Random Daily Notes

#25

Post by pitterpatter » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 8:07 AM UTC

I tend to have a notes.txt in different folders. One for each project, one for each bug investigation, etc. I'll admit I need to work on a better backup story

Re: How I Manage My Random Daily Notes

#26

Post by srich36 » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 8:07 AM UTC

For the past few months I’ve been taking markdown notes which are then transformed into HTML and pushed to an s3 bucket for public viewing. Probably not the best solution within this thread but it costs approximately nothing is a great way to get access to a web-based version of your notes anywhere.

This allows you to throw extra features in the HTML like searching for files and randomly selecting a note for viewing at your leisure.

Re: How I Manage My Random Daily Notes

#27

Post by asdff » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 8:10 AM UTC

sharken wrote: post #17

A nice solution for those that can get by with text-only notes. For storing images I use Microsoft OneNote as more often than not, there is a need to document something with text and images. And search is excellent.

One way to work images in text-only notes is to bake in the path names to the image files on your local drive rather than paste an image into the note. If I'm in terminal I can copy that text with the path, hit cmd n "open" cmd v enter and view the image with the system viewer (preview in this case). If I'm looking at the text file in textedit on mac os, I can actually do this from the right click menu under services after highlighting the path name. Could be a good solution if you are tired of onenote's bloat.

Re: How I Manage My Random Daily Notes

#28

Post by blackbear_ » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 8:11 AM UTC

bravura wrote: post #11

Yet-another-note-taking-system that doesn't solve my core problem: I want to browse my notes in chronological order AND in thematic order. i.e. I want to do semantic search and automatic topic grouping. [edit: The use-case I have in mind is you are learning about a topic, and your chronological "research notebook" is also an automatic zettlekasten.]

That's easily done in Org mode for Emacs https://orgmode.org/

Re: How I Manage My Random Daily Notes

#29

Post by ajuc » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 8:13 AM UTC

I create "notes" directory on my desktop at work, and each day I start a new text file named $DATE_$JIRATASKNO_$DECRIPTION.txt

Whenever I copy-paste stuff that might be useful I leave it there. Stuff like stacktraces, class:line_number when I was searching where something happens, links to webpages related to the task.

I was keeping a notepad tab open at all times anyway to keep context when I was doing something (otherwise I forget when I'm back from lunch and have to search again). So this is only making this context permanent and searcheable.

Then when I do something 3 months later and get a stacktrace I vaguely remember or other problem that I can imagine what the keyword would be - I just grep in that directory and find all the context needed, including jira task, commits, all related webpages, etc.

I also write short free-text notes there, but these are usually very short and less important than the copy-pasted stuff.

Re: How I Manage My Random Daily Notes

#30

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 8:14 AM UTC

nicbou wrote: post #16

I use paper. Digital notes are great if you need them to be available everywhere, or edit them time and time again, but paper is still significantly better for me. I keep my recipes in Keep and on my personal website, because I often amend them. However I discovered that printed recipes are much more pleasant to use. Likewise, I'd much rather have a dirty notebook to sketch and write on when I'm working in the garage…

[deleted]