391–400 of 420 posts
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,…
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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 just keep a private git repo that I push the updates to after entering them. I've gotten to the point that anything important enough to keep around I basically just put in a git repo somewhere.
I've been doing this kind of thing for years, to the point of managing highly complex multi-million dollar multidisciplinary projects very successfully with basic text files. When you get right down to it, it's the embodiment of a Kanban system in a text file. Because I have so much to manage every single project has its own text file in the relevant directory. In other words, I don't have one text file to rule them…
Thank you for the visualization! Your category line delimiters make so much sense. For years I've used folding headers in org or vimwiki but named by content vs project status or supporting sections. Toggling line item statuses is less visually clear than your line movement across the kanban cards. So excellent!
When Danny O'Brien started researching what he called "life hacks" around 2004, the giant decades-long text file was the key practice shared by most of his interviewees. But not just for to-do lists; also for research notes, ideas, and so on. https://craphound.com/lifehacks2.txt It's too bad things didn't work out for him to get the book on it finished, but the important thing is that Danny's still with us.
What do you mean by this? Did he have a life-threatening condition?
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,…
#! /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
I also aliased this to something short so I can quickly view notes starting at the bottom: vim "+normal G" ~/share/notes.txt
I do the same thing on my Linux machine, except I also have scripts I wrote for conveniently adding various tasks and notes to my file with automatic formatting which I predefine in another file for various types of tasks. I then have a cron job that regularly reads the file everyday and puts new items into a Postgres database so I can run queries later through a web interface I host from my home on a static IP so I…
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,…
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,…
> it cracks open Emacs on the notes file, adds a timestamp, appends the optional text Do you mind sharing how you have setup Emacs to do that? Thanks!
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Generally you don't need an indexed search on modern personal computers when what you're searching is the text you've written yourself over the last 20 years. You just use Emacs C-s incremental search. 20 years × 16 hours/day × 365 days/year × 160 words/minute × 6 bytes/word is only 6.7 gigabytes. That fits in RAM on a modern machine and takes 150 milliseconds to search through by brute force. In 1990 it was possible…
it's not about the amount of data, it's just that nothing else than Windows currently does it reliably for stuff across the local and remote filesystems plus Outlook. His motto is that if any human interaction on computer takes longer than a kid's attention span, the feature is unusable and it must be reworked or killed – and I completely agree with him.