Do you keep a .txt file with all your notes/todos?

2 points by liorgrossman 1 year ago | 7 comments

Hey HN,

It might be an old-school habit (40 y/o here), but I keep a .txt file on my Mac with tons of snippets and references, e.g. useful git or shell commands, TypeScript/CSS reference, helpful ASCII characters, my daily TODOs, and more.

For technical stuff, I find it much faster than using janky apps like Evernote or Google Keep, so it never slows me down.

However, it's still not ideal - since my .txt file has become pretty large, I'm finding it hard to keep it up-to-date or organized, and it's getting harder to find things.

I've been thinking of building a better alternative that would also allow easy sharing/discovery/forking of technical notes from others (https://earlytap.com/get/gitnotes), but I'm still pondering whether this is an actual need shared by enough people.

Curious to hear: are any of you keeping .txt files with notes on your computer too? What do you use the .txt file for? Did you find any better alternatives?

JohnFen 1 year ago |

At work, I keep my notes in text files or in a physical notebook. A new text file every day, named by date. (At home, I use a wiki)

I've yet to find a system that works better than that for me (obviously, I suppose, or I'd be using it). Finding stuff in the notes is just a grep away.

liorgrossman 1 year ago | |

Interesting.

Say you're looking for something from a few days ago, you grep all recent text files to find the relevant note?

How does it work with a physical notebook, though? I guess that's harder to grep

JohnFen 1 year ago | | |

If I'm looking for something recent or that I already know the approximate date the note was made on, I just read through the notes from the relevant time period. I also keep notes in my physical notebooks about what information is found in which note textfile on the computer.

In practice, I rarely actually need to grep or otherwise use tools to search through the notes. My eyes work fine (and, for me, are even better because I get reminded of the context in which the notes were taken).

The odd thing about the paper notebooks is that I rarely actually need to use them. Just the act of making the notes greatly enhances my natural recall of them anyway. If the notes are something deeply technical (a bunch of raw data, schematics, whatever), having written them by hand also makes me remember where I wrote them. That sort of thing only happens when handwriting, though (which is why I came back to handwriting notes). It doesn't happen at all if I've typed them into a computer.

I've probably tried just about every "knowledge manager" or note-taking application there is at one time or another, but for me and how my brain works, nothing comes close to being as effective as writing things in notebooks.

5bolts 1 year ago |

not anymore, converted over to logseq a while back and once i got used to the tagging its just quicker.

nice daily journal too. We use onenote for work stuff - shared stuff anyway

swah 1 year ago | |

How would save a code snippet there? Daily note or snippets page?

liorgrossman 1 year ago | |

Uh nice, I never heard of logseq, it look really nice!

How do you use OneNote for work though, isn't it slow? (not a user, but I assumed it'll be something similar to Google Keep)