Is there documentation on the structure of the contents? Why is it a list of * followed by + and then a list with no prefix? See https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive/blob/mast... as an example.
In Id SoftwareESWAT
john-carmack-plan-archive
Games & Emulation2015–2026
ESWAT / john-carmack-plan-archive
john-carmack-plan-archive
Collection of John Carmack’s .plan files
41Distinct people
43Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
1.4KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Collection of John Carmack’s .plan files
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 2:59:58 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year43 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2015-02-05 12:12:47 UTC to 2026-08-18 13:13:52 UTC.
* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 1 | 3 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 8 | 0 | 8 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 1 | 4 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 6 | 0 | 6 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 3 | 2 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 7 | 0 | 7 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
From the project README
An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.
Read the project’s introduction
John Carmack .plan Archive
Mirror of the John Carmack .plan Archive on floodyberry.com. These are the exports of ZIP files for his .plan files, organized by day and year.
If you appreciate this archive, then I would appreciate it if you checked out NTRPD, my digital product studio, and Reorient, my digital nomad event and workation aggregator.
Read the full README on GitHubWhat Hacker News says
8 sourcesWe owe a lot to John Carmack in many ways - but I hope one of his enduring legacies will be the amount of programmers he inspired with both the games he helped make, and the code he made available. It helped many of us to get started somewhere.
I never ended up going into games myself, but in no small part I owe my career to him.
As well as the Doom book, his plan files are a fascinating time capsule to go back over, particularly if you 'came of age' during that golden age of PC games development.
https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive
In Id SoftwareSpeaking his .plan files. One heck of a trip down memory lane: https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive/
In John Carmack: My Steve Jobs Storiessudo apt install finger
finger johnc@oculus.com
finger johnc@facebook.com
sigh. his old ones have been archived https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive
Finger was really great microblogging platform.
In John Carmack: My Steve Jobs StoriesBack when I was a kid, I used to regularly use finger check Carmack's .plan to see what he was up to.[1] Having never given this much thought, if you asked me about the origins of social media, I would have talked about MySpace and Friendster. Now I'd probably begin with talk and finger.
[1] https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive
In Origins of the finger command (1990)id Software used finger heavily during the 90s with regular .plan updates.
There's an archive of John Carmack's .plan files here:
https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive
In Now Is the Perfect Time for an RSS RenaissanceSure, here's an example from 2 days ago.
During the day, my wip.md file looks like this https://gist.githubusercontent.com/hboon/cd7ffa9ed94ce3a8bc8...
I abuse the Markdown format:
* "projects" marked with headers, with a prefix :: so I can search for it
* I mark "tasks" as done with an *
* I mark uncompleted tasks with @@
* When I start to work on a project, I add a line near the top with the start time and when I finish, I mark the end time too, using a vim macro.
I use MacVim all the time, so my wip.md is always open as the first tab. And I bind cmd+1 to it.
At the end of the day:
I run a vim macro which runs a script to generate the total time for each project ending up with: https://gist.githubusercontent.com/hboon/b8770dea077f67664d9...
I then go through it manually and delete the tasks that are still marked as @
Read the rest
@ just keeping those with an asterisk. So this effectively becomes my journal for that day. I keep a short note under the Notes: line. For eg. I might say that I didn't work because I went out with my family, or if I'm sick. I delete those mark with an asterisk in wip.md, add more or tweak the remaining ones and I have the file ready for the next day. I do my daily review at this time, so the macro which I mentioned actually opens a few other files including one called on-deck which is basically where I can grab things over from to add to wip.md. Over the years, I sometimes end up with wip.md growing too much, making it quite inhibiting. I try to keep the wip.md to ~1 page so it's more manageable.
I'm ashamed to share the script which I wrote a few years ago :P But it's simple, it just goes through each line looking for a regex match for:
11:10 PM - 11:21 PM Mimic
I have a config file that looks like this:
[timelog]
projects=Everyday,Marketing,Mimic,etc
ignoreInTotal=Plan,Review,Photos,Expenses,HomeAdmin,Paperwork
timelogDirectory=/Users/hboon/Dropbox/backup/timelog/
So it can figure out the project name from the regex and only include the relevant ones. Then compute a total for each project, for AM/PM, as well as a grand total for the day.
You can see the result in that second gist link.
I think I got the idea from John Carmack's .plan files https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive/blob/mast.... My original version back in 2009 only had this:
11:57 AM - 12:17 PM Code: Check conversation view problems
12:19 PM - 12:23 PM Code: Crash when timeline->avatar->followers->back (not home, probably), probably problem with ContactsPicker
It just evolved from there.
See also: John Carmack's plan file updates. https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive
In Why we transitioned from Medium back to our own blog