notes

Plain text is great. 20+ years of my notes are in plain text, facilitated with https://github.com/nickjj/notes. Also been doing plain text invoicing for around 7 years with https://github.com/nickjj/invoice. There's also Plutus https://github.com/nickjj/plutus for income and expense tracking. Couldn't be happier. All I do now is export my bank's CSV files and import them into Plutus, a few minutes later my books are done after I align some of the categories. I've done 2 years of taxes with this now.

I did something similar since 2001: -rw-r--r-- 1 nick nick 691 Mar 16 2001 2001-03.txt I separated mine by YYYY-MM which is long enough to keep related things together but short enough where it's easy to find things within a single file. It's all super easy to grep things out on demand. 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've been doing something similar for 20+ years at: https://github.com/nickjj/notes - Running `notes` will open this month's notes for YYYY_MM.txt in your default $EDITOR - Running `notes hello world` will append `hello world` to YYYY_MM.txt - Running `$stdout | notes` will append another program's output to YYYY_MM.txt (useful for piping your clipboard) I find this offers the least amount of resistance for quickly adding notes. Every method of input is 2 seconds away on the terminal and grep makes things searchable enough where I can still pull things out from files 5-10 years ago without issues. I tried YYYY_MM_DD.txt for a while but I found it to be too fragmented. Oftentimes I want to look at a few day's worth of notes at a glance.

Since about 2001 I used YYYY-MM.txt plain text files and have a shell script to help create notes in the most friendly way I could think of from the command line at https://github.com/nickjj/notes. Totally works fine for a knowledge log when you're streaming high level details from your brain into text. I still use it today. The repo hasn't been updated in 2 years because it's a ~20 line script with a simple API that hasn't failed yet. But when you want to really go all-in with in-depth notes on 1 semi-broad subject it's tricky because in 1 month's time if you're hardcore deep in the woods of learning, applying and using something you're going to end up with hundreds of concepts from an assorted set of tools and it kind of stinks to have all of that info sitting in 1 file. Think about using something like Kubernetes. That's really Kuberne

This is very much why I keep things simple with an automated shell script[0] that creates and appends to a YYYY-MM.txt file for notes that's optimized for easy entry from the command line. I've been doing this style of note taking since 2001. There's never any reason to think about where to save it, how to save it, what tags I should use, what it's linked to, formatting and other distracting tasks. You just run `notes` and it opens this month's file in your default $EDITOR, `notes this is my 1 liner to append to the file` or `echo "something to pipe in" | notes` depending on what you want to add. It's just 1 continuous thought process of notes that's broken up by date and having it broken up by month is nice because if you're working on something that spans a few days you have everything together most of the time to recall it when you wan

A whole bunch of little things, mainly command line tools. Most of them are open source and also have extensive documentation and a screencast video going over them. Here's a few examples: - https://github.com/nickjj/notes - https://github.com/nickjj/invoice - https://github.com/nickjj/wait-until And a few recent scripts to optimize very specific workflows: - https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/using-ffmpeg-to-get-an-mp3s-d... - https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/a-shell-script-to-keep-a-bunc... - https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/bash-aliases-to-prepare-recor...

Along similar lines, nickjj also has a similar (but bash) notes script at: https://github.com/nickjj/notes

As someone who has been creating plain text notes since 2001 I found in practice daily notes tend to be a bit too scattered. Usually if you're working on something and you want to reference your notes the next day it's a nicer experience to have that in the same notes file as today instead of yesterday. Over the decades I've settled on a YYYY-MM.txt file, or 1 file per month. Last year I open sourced https://github.com/nickjj/notes which is similar'ish to this tool. It supports opening your notes in any editor (using $EDITOR), launches this month's notes with `notes` but also lets you create notes with `notes hey just writing a note` or sending notes in from stdin with `echo "cool" | notes` (useful for pasting a note). Also, if you really wanted daily notes you could easily change the date format to include -%d. After doing notes by hand

While I don't use it personally there's: https://obsidian.md/ It's cross platform and works offline. You write markdown and it produces a visual graph of your data. It supports interlinking notes, tags and images too. Plain text notes[0] work best for me but I'd probably use Obsidian if I wanted to see things visually. When I tried it out briefly it was really solid. [0]: https://github.com/nickjj/notes

This is what I do too. I have 20 years of notes saved like this. I also open sourced a zero dependency Bash script that handles this at: https://github.com/nickjj/notes It supports adding notes in 3 different ways: notes hello world appends the text to the YYYY-MM.txt dated file echo cool | notes same as above except you can pipe in text notes opens the YYYY-MM.txt file in your configured $EDITOR I use all 3 methods of input on a regular basis depending on what I want to jot down.

I use plain text notes for everything. Have been since 2001. A while back I open sourced a script that helps me easily create them in a few different ways without leaving the terminal: https://github.com/nickjj/notes Then I let grep and friends handle the problem of searching as needed. I don't really worry about things like photos because I treat photos differently than notes or text snippets.

Does anyone else use plain text notes for everything? I've tried to optimize things so that while working, I can get things jotted down with close to zero resistance. If the barrier of entry is too high then I don't bother doing it. That means often being able to spawn a new terminal, write a command and be done with it. Or to be able to pipe something from my clipboard into an auto-dated file. I ended up putting together this ~15 line Bash script which seems to do the trick: https://github.com/nickjj/notes I've been using plain text notes since 2001, although I only recently created this script. So far so good.