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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 someth
by nickjj 6y ago
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 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 for so long I initially wrote the script with daily notes thinking it would be better but very quickly reverted back to monthly notes.
The whole thing is a 25 line bash script so it's super easy to edit if you don't like what it does by default.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago> 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. As someone who's been practicing plain text notes only few years less than you, I'm contemplating going in the reverse direction now. My default for quite a while was a YYYY-MM.org file. But now that I use org-roam[0] to organize my personal wiki, and link to the entries from my daily notes, I've found the month-files are becoming "super nodes" in the resulting graph. In any given month, I can be thinking about dozens of unrelated things - and now they suddenly become connected by virtue of being considered in the same month. It's a spurious connection that I currently exclude when visualizing/exploring the graph of my notes, but completely rejecting the connection between "transient" daily notes and permanent documents doesn't feel right either. The options I have are to either a) patch org-roam to work with headline-level granularity, instead of file-level, or b) just start using daily (YYYY-MM-DD.org) files. The latter is simpler. So in general, my experience agrees with yours here wrt. granularity, but the extra constraint of using graph building and exploration tools on top of the notes makes daily notes much more appealing. -- [0] - Roam Research clone for Org Mode.
- nickjj 6y agoAh, I haven't gone as far as graphing things out or linking them. I sort of treat my monthly files like tax records. Once the month is over it's a sealed document unless I go back to fix a typo or dead link when reviewing them later on. The super-node'ish factor of the file ends up being kind of cool from a human review perspective because you can glance through the month and get an idea of what you did during that time frame overall. I know you're big into Emacs (I've seen you comment about it a bit in the past), but have you looked into https://obsidian.md/ https://obsidian.md/ for managing your notes in the style you've described? It seems like an app designed specifically for linking and creating graph views of your notes.