Ah, the OBTF or "One big text file" meme was making rounds 10-15 years ago. I ditched mine out of curiosity for other systems -- but I'm still surprised how wel

Ah, the OBTF or "One big text file" meme was making rounds 10-15 years ago. I ditched mine out of curiosity for other systems -- but I'm still surprised how well it actually worked. Calendar, links, drafts of stuff I wrote -- it was all there. I was kind of proud when, at one point, my file (brain.txt) reached 1 MB. I'll just share some of those old links for new kids on the OBTF block. Probably one of the discussion starters in 2005: https://web.archive.org/web/20060101001857/http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/7567 https://web.archive.org/web/20060101001857/http://www.oreill... Which apparently got inspiration from this: https://craphound.com/lifehacks2.txt https://craphound.com/lifehacks2.txt And was passionately discussed by the 43 Folders crowd: https://www.43folders.com/2005/08/17/life-inside-one-big-text-file https://www.43folders.com/2005/08/17/life-inside-one-big-tex... Me, I essentially stole and fine-tuned the syntax exlained here: http://www.matthewcornell.org/blog/2005/8/21/my-big-arse-text-file-a-poor-mans-wikiblogpim.html http://www.matthewcornell.org/blog/2005/8/21/my-big-arse-tex... OBTF vs Zettelkasten (from 2020): https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/1508/zettelkasten-vs-one-big-text-file https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/1508/zettelkasten-v... I've tried to set up a Zettelkasten many times, but in practice, loosely structured flat files, maybe utilizing the OS' file system (folders) and occasional ad-hoc hierarchies, still beats everything else for me.