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Hacker News Hacker NewsThere is also this article today: https://jon.recoil.org/blog/2025/12/an-svg-is-all-you-need.h... about how great good ol' svg is. And then every recurring article about using RSS instead of all the other siloed products.
textfiles, makefiles, perl, php, rss, text based email, news groups, irc, icq, vim/emacs, sed, awk; all better than the crap they have spawned that is supposed to be "better".
Out of curiosity, what technology in the past 5 years do you use that you actually find better than something from 20 years ago?
At the first line of the a .txt file put .LOG This will then put a timestamp at the end of the file every time you open it.
Also, if you press the F5 key it inserts a timestamp.
Been using this for years and it's pretty much all I ever needed.
The idea is to approach content as data-first, with tools on top, and be at ease with plans to Walk-Out when needed.
Besides the article in discussion, here are a few inspirations for plain-text as the defaults.
- The writing of our very own Obsidian’s CEO, Steph Ango at https://stephango.com @kepano on HN.
- A Plain Text Personal Organizer, https://danlucraft.com/blog/2008/04/plain-text-organizer/
- A template to organise life in plain text, https://github.com/jukil/plain-text-life
- Achieve a text-only work-flow, http://donlelek.github.io/2015-03-09-text-only-workflow/
- Note Taking, Writing and Life Organization Using Plain Text Files, http://www.markwk.com/plain-text-life.html
- Plain Text Journaling System, https://georgecoghill.wordpress.com/plain-text/
- Plain Text Project, https://plaintextproject.online/
- PlainText Productivity, http://plaintext-productivity.net/
- The Plain Text Life: Note Taking, Writing and Life Organization Using Plain Text Files, http://www.markwk.com/plain-text-life.html
- Use plain text email, https://useplaintext.email/
- Writing Plain Text by Derek Sivers, https://sive.rs/plaintext
I've tried alternatives, but OneNote has been simple and reliable, it just works everywhere. Probably one of the most important apps in my life.
function today() {
TODAY_DIR="$HOME/today/"
DATE_DIR=$(date +'%Y-%m-%d')
if [ ! -d $TODAY_DIR$DATE_DIR ];
then
mkdir -p $TODAY_DIR$DATE_DIR
fi;
echo $TODAY_DIR$DATE_DIR
}
It's a sort of landing zone for all of the miscellaneous artifacts I might deal with on a given day as well:, e.g. `wget -P $(today) https://site.net/cooldata.gzip`.
At an individual level you’re basically always better off using text files as the equivalent of a machine-readable blank piece of paper to scrawl notes on with minimal (if any) thought being given to other features.
I log all my lab work and how many hours I've worked in a day and it calculates my hours in a separate tab automatically. Items I need to follow up on are in bold, and get unbolded when I've followed up on them. When I have to write a report, everything is there in chronological order and it is super easy to take the relevant lines and write out the path of my work. When I get into the lab, I open my sheet and bam! I'm right where I left off before I can have the first sip of coffee.
This has been a complete game changer for me.
I've never been so organized in my life.
I've always been an iPhone user and have never seen a .txt file on one and probably you wouldn't be able to edit one on an iPhone if you did have it in Files app - I'm not counting Notes app as a text file here.
I do quarterly notes inside of Notes app but it mostly non-work related stuff and doesn't integrate well with desktop since its kind of a pain to login to iCloud from browser. Quarterly notes bc once the note gets too long, it gets very laggy on phone and is difficult to navigate; i.e. getting to the bottom to write a new line can be tough on mobile.
Knowing myself, though, I don't think I'd keep up with this since it would take mental strength on my part to overthink the data structure for the task entry. I've been thinking about how I might also track emotional impact of my todo items on me. I wonder if the open nature of a txt file would be good for instant journaling about things that give me stress?
I really like having some guardrails when it comes to organizing thoughts so this system might not be for me. Also building up the daily habit to organize the todos at the end of each day is something I'd probably struggle with for a while. I do agree that is a great habit to have, still.
Tasks.org has cool filter system, which alongside it's widget makes me list of everything that's important to me just on home screen of my smartphone. For example, I can make a filter "tasks starting today, priority yellow or higher, lists "personal" or "projects", sorr by due date). And make corresponding widget.
Samsung OneUI has widget carousel feature, so I make multiple widgets with different filters and switch by swiping. Very convinent.
Also tasks.org support syncing to nextcloud, but I keep it disabled due to tons of bugs in nextcloud itself.
I make separate list for everything not important at current period of my life, so I can review it later (usually once a week or once a month, my life is very unstable and unpredictable to tell more exactly)
I use this for about a year, so it's not so well tested workflow, but for now it works better than other variants I tried.
It's stored in my Dropbox so it is always backed up, though it is not VCS'd. It's worked for me for years, far better than any app. Too, I have full control over it, and years of the data, free for processing by any tools/LLMs that I might want (I haven't wanted such a thing so far, but maybe I will).
If I had to do it all over again, I'd do it how we started: sales meeting every Monday. Open last week's meeting text file. Review the current status of deals. Remove ones that are dead, add ones that are new, update ones that changed. Save file. See you next week.
Now since I am managing multiple teams, this is not longer scalable. Also majority of work revolves around Slack. People post stuff that I need to follow up at a later stage. I copy these posts and put them into the todo list file.
1. As text files get longer you lose view of things unlike paper. I still feel limited and strong difficulty in fully adopting an online todo system.
2. Many other stuff like Slack threads are difficult to get into todo files. They also lose context. This I would say is a modern problem.
What do you guys think?
If anyone knows of a good rich markdown / block based editor that can handle huge pages let me know!
Every morning I pickup a sheet of used paper, and on the backside of it I hand-copy unfinished todos from the previous day. I write down every important details from that day on that paper. At the end of the day, it goes into a file folder for future references.
Actually I got this habit while working in the military, where I received a 1-page-long daily status report every morning. I used that to keep track of both organization status and my daily tasks. I did use this log to analyze, design and optimize procedures, one of which involved over 100 tasks.
Searching over this record can be problematic, but most of the time I have auxiliary records like email, message, call history, etc, which can help me with tracking down “when” things happened. It’s not much different from digging into system log.
However, I think, with the rise of LLMs, perhaps it’s about time to migrate to txt finally.
What this is:
$ diary # opens vim to $DIARYDIR/year/month/day.md
If I want some dedication information "pinned" so I don't lose track of it, I just create a dedicated group chat for that topic.
I have two major use cases:
1) a TODO list
2) longer texts (project plans, travel plans, shopping lists for things to buy sometimes in the next 6 months (e.g. books to read), etc.).
The TODO list is my daily driver. As the family became larger, it became difficult to track what needs to be done the next day (including simple things, like "give a daily dose of vitamin", "clean & lube the bike chain every 2w"). For a very long time, I used pen & paper. It was OK, used it for years, but it didn't scale so well with kids. An Android TODO/reminder app with notifications and repeats was a life saver. I used BZ Reminder (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bzzzapp) which ticked all the boxes. But the author decided to downgrade the lifetime licences to periodic... It's still not expensive but I don't approve the behavior. After trying out a dozen of similar apps, I ended up with "Reminders: Todo List & Notes" (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pocketbril...). I can't live without a tool like this anymore. TBH, pen & paper TODO lists are still around.
For the longer texts I used an offline wiki (ZIM) for quite some time. Then gradually moved to Google Keep (simple, can accept text & lists, and can be shared). The Keep collection kept growing. With both lists and texts. It's pretty bad input method, but its simplicity kept me using it for years. Now I'm happy with simple txt files (syced between phone & PCs, and properly backed up).
-rw-r--r-- 1 nick nick 691 Mar 16 2001 2001-03.txt
There's no procrastination about organizing or perfect tags. Just brain dump the thought or notes and move on with life.
https://github.com/nickjj/notes was created so I can type things like `notes hello world` and it inserts it for the correct YYYY-MM or `notes` to open the current YYYY-MM in your $EDITOR. It supports piping into it too (good for pasting from your clipboard). It's ~40 lines of shell scripting with comments.
I'm still working on the app today but planning to get it out into the world in the new year. I think anyone who enjoys this notepad technique will find it quite familiar but just "powered up" maybe.
It's my timelog and work journal as I expand on items and mark them off as I work on them.
Incidently, I was exploring new ways to work with it recently: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:bryys25pc2fnagnyxqgsglhd/po...
I have placed it as one of the two bottom widgets on the lock screen which gives me immediate access to everything I need to capture a thought: a main note, the list where I want to store it (e.g., work or personal), the notes field if more context is needed, and I can flag it or schedule a reminder. The app then also has an optional auto-categorize feature which works quite well. Add to that reliable sync across devices and except for a good way to bulk export lists, this has everything I want from a quick draft and capture system.
To me this is a good balance of: - Writing things down is the major benefit for me, writing down on physical paper is even more helpful. - Forces me to garbage collect irrelevant stuff. - I don't need an app or even to buy paper really.
The only extra thing is I set up autohotkey macros
For example typing $today or $yesterday will insert the date with a dividing line underneath to separate days into clear blocks
I've tried a lot of different note apps and what I eventually realized is that when it comes to work, I generally don't actually care about old notes 98% of the time.
I only really care about the last week or two and when everything is in one file its optimized for viewing that, like a working memory.
The text file ends up gigantic but its still small data for a computer even after many years of adding to a single file and searching is still fast.
It was really interesting to see the sort of "second stage" discovery of things like this when obsidian got hot, and I toyed with many of those for a while.
And the end result was me getting even further back into doing what zim does, and even finding new cool little time savers (e.g. interwiki links).
My "productivity solution" is currently TriliumNotes with three work spaces as 1) Planner with sub notes for year, month, day 2) Brain Dump with subnotes for year and month 3) Projects with sub notes for each project. I manage tasks with Vikunja and then my time with Google Calendar.
It's an absolute mess, but it's the closest I've gotten to a solution that works the way my brain does.
I now just use three text files open in Sublime Text: todo-today.txt, todo-this-week.txt, and todo-later.txt. I review them daily and promote todos to the next file when appropriate.
I don't use the 'linking' feature between notes. The whole 'second brain' thing seems like something you do to make a neat screenshot of your note graph. I just use regular old folders like a file directory. My notes have gotten a little messy though.
Pretty sure I found it here.
multiple files
multiple directories (folders)
(scripts)
I've used so many 'productivity' apps, it makes me sick to think of it. This has been the most consistent tool I've ever used.
Exports to mark down if I ever want to leave, works on everything, and sufficiently flexible for note taking and task management.
Every now and then I get the productivity bug and look around but can’t find anything that hits like Amplenote does.
I finally figured this setup this year. It had changed my life, in a minor yet significant way.
(I also link to other relevant text files at the top of the doc)
Then the next week's new file has the pasted-over to-do items on top.
These were OneNote/Sharepoint files forever until earlier this year. Now they live on my local network, backed up, glaciered.
Longer explanation: https://zachsaucier.com/blog/notes-the-best-todo-app/
So maybe there's an app that combines the two?
And even better than coding the 2001st one.
No upgrade CTA, no nonsense. now even I can feed it to llm and get feedback about my planning, routines and everything
Relatedly, I find all of the todo/task management apps to be utterly overwhelming for my person tasks. I'm so tired of all of the task apps adding way too much complexity.
All I want is:
* Something that's available on all of my devices.
* Can be ordered by sections
* Triage
* Now
* Today
* Tomorrow
* Soon
* Eventually
* Whenever (when-never)
* Lets me drag-and-drop tasks for ordering
> 4pm Rihanna talk (368 CIT)
> 5pm 1:1 with Beyonce #phdadvisee
> 6pm faculty interview dinner with Madonna
lol