11 ms·

Plaintext Productivity

220 points by FelipeRM 5y ago

hughrr 5y ago
Plain text sucks. It’s so hard to represent context, time, location and state. I have got to the point I just use the reminders app in apple ecosystem. Notes go in the notes app. Things get deleted when done or disinterest kicks in. Shortcuts fills up regular tasks for me.
- Madeindjs 5y ago
  With plaintext you can do what you need. For example, with todo.txt context are just prefixed by `@`. You can also add special tag with `key:value`. So for example you can add `location:paris` and retrieve it with whatever search tool.
  - hughrr 5y ago
    But I can't speak to my arm and add something to the list. Nor will a text file remind me to do something at a specific time.
- syngrog66 5y ago
  I quickly craft tiny ad hoc DSLs as needed. staying in text lets me control my own data, minimize spending, always work offline, have easy version control and backups, maximum multiplatform support, and maximum futureproofing. not perfect but I usually gain more than I win
  - hughrr 5y ago
    My gains are sync across all my devices instantly including the one strapped to my wrist, voice control, location awareness, context awareness, prompting, scripted automation, attachments and full tagging and categorisation system and I can share tasks with people including colleagues and family and check status. I'll take that set of features over your self-imposed compromises. I closed over 23,000 tasks so far with it while managing a full time job and a family.
    - syngrog66 5y ago
      I totally respect that. if that works better for you, keep on doing it I've probably closed a mega-zillion (1) tasks from 1980ish onward using my hyper-minimalist approach, so, I think both styles can work (1: guestimated, in approx 50ms. lol)
codazoda 5y ago
This is very detailed and well documented and is similar to how I work in my web based app, Nolific. Specifically, I keep notes in plain-text and write drafts in markdown. I don’t keep my todo in the system, but it would be relatively easy to do so. Once I’m happy with a draft, I copy/paste it into an MD file on my blog. All my notes are easily searchable. I built a browser based solution because I spend most of my day in the browser anyway, so I just keep Nolific pinned in a tab. It’s free and open source if you wanna check it out. https://www.nolific.com https://www.nolific.com
- forgotpwd16 5y ago
  The rather-name-just-search approach seems less hassle but lack of version control may be an issue. Perhaps automatic checkpoints could be made on large changes or when leaving the page.
podiki 5y ago
When I see this all I can think of is Emacs and org-mode, harness all that power and that existing ecosystem. At a quick glance seems to be a lot of what this does.
- crispyalmond 5y ago
  My thoughts exactly. Org-mode just works and has so much functionality that I haven't even discovered yet. I am currently using it for notes and TODOs.
- forgotpwd16 5y ago
  The entire system is very elementary compared to org-mode. This is good for some (people that wanna try this approach since it's simpler and mostly works fine), bad for others (people accustomed to all features org provides).
- dv35z 5y ago
  Hope its OK to share a quick tech rage rant? So, gotta jump in here and say - I'm going thru the "Let's figure out Emacs, Org-Mode, Org-Roam - get my todo, calendar, files, notes all in one... somewhat coherent system". I've got my Emacs cheatsheets, and all that. I'm on the journey. But I can't help but think - some one really needs to do the UNIX->Next->MacOS of this. That is, figure out a solution that works, standardize it, make it easy. I saw a guy made an Raspberry-Pi, with Emacs, & an e-ink display. When someone makes a "personal productivity device" - some sort of E-Ink Palm Pilot + Blackberry keyboard + Easy mode Emacs-org/notes/todo/calendar/rolodex, that syncs to your laptop, phone, refrigerator calendar... that's going to be huge. The reason I am going through this journey is because I am treating it as a life-investment. Getting your personal productivity / information systems in order, getting that problem solved... for LIFE. It would be a huge win. So despite the pain, I'm sold on the benefits, have many people who have told me about the impact of org-mode etc on their life. So, I'm taking that at face value, trying to actually apply this advice to my own life (instead of reading about it, agreeing, and then taking 0 action on it). The irony of not prioritizing setting up a reliable TODO system is not lost on me... It's a daily laugh, as I Google search yet another Emacs package manager, or diagnose random Lisp errors - this programming language I have never used before, but this important tool requires me to know in order to... configure a note template. What. I know there are historical reasons for the various keyboard shortcuts. But all these "arcane" (I know, "different") keyboard shortcuts for "Yank", "Buffers". Emacs keeps on opening windows. I can barely remember how to even save a file & quit. Don't worry - got Doom Emacs! I'm getting it, but still a whole 'nother set of "non standard" keyboard shortcuts. I genuinely appreciate the various bloggers and Youtube videos out there, where people explain their system, walk you through installing & configuring stuff. But I can't help to think. This system is so powerful. So many smart people working on it, making plug-ins for it, creating systems for it. Where is the smart person who can tie it together as a holistic system, make it EASY, and still be open source. Am I missing something? I'm thinking "Green" mode on the SLR camera. It works. If you want to tweak, you can experiment with aperture/shutter priority as you learn when/why to use it. Ok, thanks for hearing out my Emacs rant. (as I go smoke a J, and go back to learning Emacs)
hanlec 5y ago
Whatever system I have (tried to) used over time, I've run into the following challenges: 1. how to deal with old tasks (are they relevant anymore? should they be removed?). 2. connecting tasks to their related source and needed information to act For the former, the accumulation of old stuff has consistently led to less and less usage of the system and as a result to a continuously decreasing trust in that system. Adopting a new solution has given the feeling of a better system with better chances to success; but it has mainly been about having a (temporarily) new clean inbox.
- slk500 5y ago
  in emacs org-mode you can archive some tasks, text - it will move it to another text file ex. archive.txt with the timestamp or archiving it. Beside this keep your file in git. so you delete text & make explicit commit message that something was removed.
- iib 5y ago
  Some people that were interested in their productivity that I read seemed to have systems that regularly cleaned their todo lists for old tasks. Stephen King [1] advises aspiring writers not to note their writing prompts, as the best ideas should pop into your head regularly, or nullprogram.com [2] programming in /tmp/. So maybe the way to go is to have a logrotate-like on your input file. [1] On writing -- Stephen King, although I read it a very long time ago and would not be able to point to a specific page. [2] I searched the web but can't find the exact citation, and there is no search feature on the website.
- fellowniusmonk 5y ago
  Yeah, I've been thinking about how to tackle this and I am convinced any personal note taking app should have an archive all and start over button. A clean sheet is intimidating when you don't know where to start but is a hard requirement downstream once your chosen abstraction starts to break under the weight.
- raju 5y ago
  @luxpir mentioned Obsidian in another comment [1] and it might be what you are looking for, in particular with a community plugin called Obsidian Dataview [2]. Dataview uses JavaScript as a query language and can query the Obsidian "vault" and create different views. Another tool to look at is Logseq [3], which is essentially an outliner (supports both MarkDown and Org syntax), but supports a rather simplistic TODO management system. The benefit here is exactly what you describe—as you work in Logseq, you can create Todos, thereby connecting the task to the related source and any context that surrounds the todo. Furthermore, Logseq also allows for queries [4], allowing you to query your "knowledge graph", which you can embed in other pages. Both Obsidian and Logseq store your files locally, so they can be easily version-controlled (In fact, Logseq routines commits your files for you). [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30747131 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30747131 [2] https://github.com/blacksmithgu/obsidian-dataview https://github.com/blacksmithgu/obsidian-dataview [3] https://logseq.com/ https://logseq.com/ [4] https://logseq.github.io/#/page/Queries https://logseq.github.io/#/page/Queries [Edited for formatting]
forgotpwd16 5y ago
Why name folders with starting @ seeing there's nothing else in the directory they reside?
wim 5y ago
Interesting, I also keep coming back to text files for productivity, because of the speed and simplicity. Some of the points the author mentions though like due dates, a journal/schedule and version history still aren’t really solved very well I think. Not to mention collaborating in a team that way (not a requirement for the author I think, but something I could use myself). I actually tried simply using VSCode for a while with just a plain text "todo.txt", "schedule.txt" and "projects.txt", but that didn’t scale very well (also didn't really get things like autocomplete to work properly). If anyone’s interested, we decided to see if we can actually solve this ourselves and are building an editor/IDE from scratch now, but specifically for "todo.txt" (https://thymer.com https://thymer.com).
- bleachedsleet 5y ago
  Cool looking project...have a beta I could try yet?
  - wim 5y ago
    Thanks! Not yet, still working on getting a beta out asap
lambda_dn 5y ago
Org mode does all this but 100x better.
- danuker 5y ago
  And also with a 100x learning curve.
  - czernobog 5y ago
    org mode is alright but learning emacs has been a real deal for me.
    - Oreb 5y ago
      I’m the opposite. I love emacs and have been using it since the previous millennium, but no matter how often I try, I just can’t get comfortable with org-mode. I spend far more time looking up how to do stuff than I do writing, and I never seem to be able to remember anything.
  - Groxx 5y ago
    And also a single un-specified implementation. (though I am thrilled that it is in progress! https://orgmode.org/worg/dev/org-syntax.html https://orgmode.org/worg/dev/org-syntax.html )
  - kkfx 5y ago
    Hum, meh, personally I've jumped the ship from Unix to Emacs few years ago: in a month Emacs became mine most used application, in another or two my windows manager (EXWM) and if few more months I decide to devastate my decades-old hyper-curated home taxonomy to put all my files in a cache-like tree handled via org-attach, accessing them mostly via search&narrow before with linkmarks + manual org-mode, after with org-roam. I have almost anything in Emacs form emails to personal finance, files, agenda, ... everything integrated in ways no other tool I know of can give... The learning curve exists of course, but it's not that hard if you have a bit of IT background and in any case it pay back so much that's absolutely worth the initial "capex"...
  - 5y ago
smusamashah 5y ago
I have been using OneNote after going through a bunch of plaintext tools and I have never been at more ease with dumping info from my head for later retrieval. OneNote makes it as fluent as possible with as little resistance that no other tool offers. New version of OneNote (metro style) has been bitten by designers though like all good things in recent times. Also, it does not have customizable shortcut keys making formatting code snippets a non-trivial process. Every page is a white board which no other tool does and that's where it's power is. Plaintext can't beat that.
- yardshop 5y ago
  I love OneNote, it's my primary note taking tool, although I'm eagerly looking for a more open alternative. I love pasting in screen clips and shots, and being able to extract text from them when I need to. I also love arbitrary indentation and use that for structuring my notes. This is something that Markdown can't do, and I have yet to find any kind of markup-supporting text format that doesn't treat indented text as pre-formatted. I dislike that newer versions force syncing with Office 365 and have reduced the file format flexibility of older versions, like saving the notebook on a network share, or exporting to an MHT file if one wants. I still use the Office 2016 version and am hesitant to try newer versions again. I have numerous notebooks on many different PCs and want to coalesce them at some point, but am not comfortable putting them all on Office 365. But for day to day note taking, it's the lowest friction tool I've found that comes closest to my preferences.
- visviva 5y ago
  I've become a heavy user of OneNote recently as well, but I'm always in search of ways to improve my workflow. I have yet to fall into a consistent pattern of usage.
jen729w 5y ago
Not necessarily a ‘productivity hack’ in that it neither relates to productivity nor is a hack, but in our latest side project my partner and I have a need to share textual data about the various episodes/lessons that we’re creating. Of course any number of notes systems allow one to do that, and I have my very own system of organisation that helps [0], but we ended up, at my partner’s suggestion, just saving individual .txt files in the folders containing the episodes. [0]: https://johnnydecimal.com https://johnnydecimal.com Nothing new here of course, it’s what we all used to do when it was the only option. But it feels like it’s been so long since I just fired up TextEdit, typed the words, and File-SaveAs’d it in to a folder. It’s weirdly refreshing and works really well. I noted that it was my partner’s suggestion because she’s been learning Markdown, and as an ex-professional-writer (medical/patient) is overjoyed that she doesn’t have to use Word. When we were looking for a solution she said, well why don’t we just save a file there. So simple that I’d missed it.
ajuc 5y ago
Not exactly TODO but I do something similar. I have a directory with text files and images named like: 2022_03_20_1_short_description.txt or 2022_03_20_2_config_screenshot.png The names are mostly to group images with related text files when I grep later. I create the file at the start of each work day, write a few lines of TODO for the task I'm working on, and whenever I copy-paste something that seems relevant - I paste it there and leave it with a few empty lines as separator. If image is better I screenshot only the relevant part and possibly add some notes with paint and save it in that directory. When I investigate some error I paste stacktrace there. And when I find solution - I paste the link or the git commit or JIRA task or description. If I do several unrelated things in the same day I sometimes create several files, but it doesn't matter that much. It saved me A LOT of time. A quick grep and I have all the context of some error that last happened 8 months ago.
- nameless_me 5y ago
  Some may think it primitive but your workflow is fast, efficient, backups up easily (I write a simple DOS batch file which copies all new or updated files to a USB stick) and backs up to the cloud easily as well. Grepping to find files by date is easy and if a more detailed document had to be generated, you have pandoc or Libreoffice to produce PDFs using those source data files.
- anon2020dot00 5y ago
  I do something close to this but with even less organization up-front. I label my text file as <day>.txt, like 21.txt, since it is under a month folder. For images, I take screenshots with the Snag-It software which automatically assigns a time-based filename to the screenshot and stores it in a central directory. So, at the start, my text files and screenshots have basic filenames which are time-based. Later-on, I'll create an index for the text files with a Google Doc; an index which is a basic list of the text files with some brief bullet-point comments describing each one. Actually, for text files, I just describe it with a comma-delimited list of tags/titles per file.
candiddevmike 5y ago
I don't think I can be productive with \r\n line endings.
kkfx 5y ago
Plain-text means just something that can be manipulated easily, witch is damn good. But tools to properly and comfortably manipulate text are needed. For me the solution is Emacs that let me combine almost anything, access almost anything in a snap. It's a bit buggy sometimes, not really crafted for such usage, but even with such issues is still far above all other tools I know (and being a sysadmin I have see many software) to a point that I've developed the idea that after Xerox and LispM we humans completely lost the way of IT development just to lock users out of the real potential IT gives...
xenodium 5y ago
Plain text can be super versatile (task-tracking and note-taking are great examples), but equally important are the guarantees that your content is truly yours (no lock-in). With all these plain text posts surfacing regularly, I'd love for the lesser-known org markup (https://orgmode.org https://orgmode.org) to gain more adoption. It's a real power-house. Its Emacs origin may put some off, but it's plain text, so your content can be ingested/consumed by either regular text editors or any app focusing on specific user-journeys. I built two org-powered apps for iOS myself: https://plainorg.com https://plainorg.com https://flathabits.com https://flathabits.com There are other great ones out there: https://beorg.app https://beorg.app https://braintool.org https://braintool.org https://easyorgmode.com https://easyorgmode.com https://logseq.com https://logseq.com https://organice.200ok.ch https://organice.200ok.ch https://orgro.org https://orgro.org http://orgzly.com http://orgzly.com Thanks to Karl Voit for driving org markup awareness outside of Emacs via Orgdown https://gitlab.com/publicvoit/orgdown https://gitlab.com/publicvoit/orgdown. He's also got a great post showcasing org strengths at https://karl-voit.at/2017/09/23/orgmode-as-markup-only https://karl-voit.at/2017/09/23/orgmode-as-markup-only
- afarviral 5y ago
  Orgmode is awesome but it's frustratingly difficult to use outside Emacs, and using Emacs isn't an option or productive for the vast majority of people, far, far too much cognitive overhead. Im hoping for a hybrid that is easier to read as plain markup but has the extensibility of org.
  - stjohnswarts 5y ago
    I've found Obsidian pretty great, but it's not opensource. It has a pretty alive community as well and it's all just text and pictures in the end, so it stays in your control.
    - afarviral 5y ago
      I'm a big fan of obsidian and use it for all my notes already but being basically just text, links, and pictures, it's easy to long for the power of org-mode.
Flankk 5y ago
David Allen is a leader of The Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness. Between cargo cult and actual cults I have a low opinion of programmers in general. Programmers think everything needs a system or an abstraction. I guess when all you have is a hammer everything is a nail.
- pmarreck 5y ago
  The guy who wrote the article is Michael Descy. The article mentions GTD a few times, THAT is what David Allen is responsible for, but the article also mentioned the Autofocus system, which was a new concept to me and which I am now quite fascinated by. > cults... programmers I've been coding for 20+ years and have yet to see any correlation between programmers and any cult (cargo or otherwise... ok maybe cargo SOMEtimes, but certainly nothing else)
  - Flankk 5y ago
    GTD seminars are used to induct members into the cult. It's analogous to Scientology and their ideas on productivity. The audience for GTD is mostly programmers due to corporations sponsoring the seminars. Everything programmers do is ideological. Programming is also hard which is why coders are susceptible to scams. Uncle Bob and OOP principles are very cult-like as well although the methodology has proven itself suboptimal and convoluted.
    - pmarreck 5y ago
      Any thoughts on the Autofocus method? It seems to have had a heyday I missed about 10-11 years ago with apps made very specific to it kind of being end-of-lifed as of 5+ years ago (sadly), but it looks useful (and not at all culty)
- forgotmypw17 5y ago
  >The Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness Thanks for mentioning this, I hadn't heard about it before, and it seems like a great practice.
UberFly 5y ago
I like the todo.txt concept and have given it a go for a while, most recently using the really nice frontend UI "Sleek". I ended up moving away due to the limited functionality of todo.txt as a whole. I needed to be able to add simple notes to my todos at times and it's just not possible or easy to accomplish this basic need with todo.txt.
mch82 5y ago
How come we don’t have plaintext symbols for the formatting basics: bold, italic, color? Maybe we could expand Unicode based on lessons learned from Markdown/typesetting & the formatting characters could be added as non-printing characters. Visibility could be toggled with other whitespace characters.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  You can use the standard ANSI escapes, if no other markup is defined. Adding new formatting codes via Unicode just wouldn't change much.
luxpir 5y ago
I'll be first to mention obsidian here. I solved my overloading/losing faith in systems issue with it by using a daily template. At the bottom of which are all the tasks in daily notes, generated by an inline script, another dynamic list of tasks for my freelance work. I could add my #ideas or #content lists too, but they are stored elsewhere. I add the #inv tag to my freelance work and that moves them to the "to invoice" list. When finally checked they disappear, but all still stored on their initial log date (all searchable, of course). So long lists of crud don't get the chance to accumulate, and ideas are easily searchable either in dynamic lists or just using search. On the same page are mental/physical subheadings so a small bit of journalling takes place. I never look back at it, but it's there. This beats all previous attempts at organisational systems. Obsidian has a great mobile app. Syncthing keeps them updated. Previous systems were Trello (perma loss of everything archived), big single plaintext file (soon becomes a heaving mess), paper (no search and easy for things to sink/not be surfaced). Taskwarrior, which was great for a long time, but tricky to sync and no additional features like journalling, swipe file creation, flashcards, search, mobile app (sync to cli env on Android was clunky). And surely more I'm forgetting. Side benefits: all plaintext, whatever happens to obsidian. Graph view of all interconnected ideas. Easy resurfacing of old but relevant ideas through search and backlink sidebar. Could import my attempts at using vimwiki with zero conversion required. Much better UX than Vim. Great place to also write content, use wordcount, sprint, wordcount goal, calendar features etc. For me the days of Vimwiki and org-mode are now numbered. Even most other note taking software tbh, for anyone OK with syncing their own stuff and figuring out a little bit of basic script syntax for the dynamic lists within the plaintext files.
- itsjloh 5y ago
  I'm a recent Obsidian convert, absolutely love it and its the only note taking app that I've managed to stick to past a few weeks. How do you use custom scripts in it? I'm aware you can make plugins and things for it but I'd love to be able to write up a script or two to update some shortcodes for some nice weekly stats in a few places if possible
  - luxpir 5y ago
    There is the full-on dataview plugin, lets you do anything in JS. I just use the tasks plugin query engine, which is plenty for me, but it sounds like you would need dataview. The forum has loads of very well developed examples.
syngrog66 5y ago
I've been a hardcore text-and-CLI-first-maybe-only guy for decades, as a workflow optimization rule. I coined my own private little name for it too: CLIFMO. I have my own development process and architecture strategy all associated with that name/abbrev. (Which I might write down and share one day, haha.) one thing I love about having a plaintext bias when working is that many opportunities arise to design ad hoc DSLs, as I need them. when they begin to feel like a net win its also fairly easy to start blurring the lines between text notes and working code, esp with shell scripts and langs like Python
posharma 5y ago
Use the tool that best suits your workflow and that's most convenient to you. There's no need to be super enthusiastic about plaintext.
twobitshifter 5y ago
Has anybody had success with plain text working in teams in business? I prefer it myself but teaching everyone I work with markdown, org-mode, git etc seems like a big undertaking. For example, we have a specification in development and that spec lives in Microsoft word. Plain text would make tracking the changes and collaborating on it much easier IMO, but word has it’s own abilities to do that. And with plain text you give up the wysiwyg formatting which people are accustomed to. Perhaps writing specifications in confluence would be better than plain text or word - who knows. It’s likely only because of my bias that I think plain text is a reasonable choice.
sharikous 5y ago
I believe plaintext/markdown as a format is a bit overblown, though I am glad there is a wealth of tools and tips around it. Just as an example as a Hebrew speaker who regularly uses math - MD editors that support both RTL and math rendering are difficult to find. And that's squarely inside the domain of a "knowledge worker".
- AlanYx 5y ago
  Emacs supports both RTL and math rendering (and not just in preview but inline too). I think this kind of flexibility is part of what is driving the popularity of plaintext… there are dozens of modern web apps for everything, but if you need an idiosyncratic combination of features, old-school tools are sometimes one of the better options.
pmarreck 5y ago
> Windows, in my opinion, is far behind Mac OS X, iOS, and Android, in having thoughtfully designed and efficient software—both in general, and in particular for writing, organization, and task management. Jesus, I thought it was just me and my long-time Apple bias (as a person who grudgingly uses Windows a lot of the time)
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captn3m0 5y ago
Related: I maintain a list of products/projects etc that let you maintain more and more things in plaintext. https://github.com/captn3m0/plaintext-everything https://github.com/captn3m0/plaintext-everything (Contributions welcome)
nemoniac 5y ago
Put "...on Windows" in the title.
OtomotO 5y ago
People arguing about proprietary formats being supported by other applications and backups plus checksums being a solution against bitrot miss the major point: Simplicity. If "simple" text is all you need to fulfill a certain goal, just stop there. Any system should be as complex as absolutely necessary, not a shred more. And yes, plain text is good enough for a very many usecases. KISS people, KISS ;)
- Kinrany 5y ago
  Bytes are certainly simpler than Unicode.
  - OtomotO 5y ago
    If in the end I have to show ß or Ø or È it doesn't matter how it's encoded, but I would certainly argue for a unicode standard to be better than some proprietary format. KISS doesn't mean that you can't have nice features, it means to have nice features with meaningful complexity
lesterzone 5y ago
I'm using a small command line tool developed in go, I have a base.md file and when I run personal init will open a new file for 'today' using base.md I can also create a post/note/idea even mind map using markdown. I've been using plain text for about 3 years, totally recommend it. bonus tip, I use grep to find content in my files. and yes, I have a personal backup command :D

220 points by FelipeRM 5y ago

Plain text sucks. It’s so hard to represent context, time, location and state. I have got to the point I just use the reminders app in apple ecosystem. Notes go in the notes app. Things get deleted when done or disinterest kicks in. Shortcuts fills up regular tasks for me.

Madeindjs 5y ago
With plaintext you can do what you need. For example, with todo.txt context are just prefixed by `@`. You can also add special tag with `key:value`. So for example you can add `location:paris` and retrieve it with whatever search tool.
- hughrr 5y ago
  But I can't speak to my arm and add something to the list. Nor will a text file remind me to do something at a specific time.
syngrog66 5y ago
I quickly craft tiny ad hoc DSLs as needed. staying in text lets me control my own data, minimize spending, always work offline, have easy version control and backups, maximum multiplatform support, and maximum futureproofing. not perfect but I usually gain more than I win
- hughrr 5y ago
  My gains are sync across all my devices instantly including the one strapped to my wrist, voice control, location awareness, context awareness, prompting, scripted automation, attachments and full tagging and categorisation system and I can share tasks with people including colleagues and family and check status. I'll take that set of features over your self-imposed compromises. I closed over 23,000 tasks so far with it while managing a full time job and a family.
  - syngrog66 5y ago
    I totally respect that. if that works better for you, keep on doing it I've probably closed a mega-zillion (1) tasks from 1980ish onward using my hyper-minimalist approach, so, I think both styles can work (1: guestimated, in approx 50ms. lol)

codazoda 5y ago

This is very detailed and well documented and is similar to how I work in my web based app, Nolific. Specifically, I keep notes in plain-text and write drafts in markdown. I don’t keep my todo in the system, but it would be relatively easy to do so. Once I’m happy with a draft, I copy/paste it into an MD file on my blog. All my notes are easily searchable. I built a browser based solution because I spend most of my day in the browser anyway, so I just keep Nolific pinned in a tab. It’s free and open source if you wanna check it out. https://www.nolific.com https://www.nolific.com

forgotpwd16 5y ago
The rather-name-just-search approach seems less hassle but lack of version control may be an issue. Perhaps automatic checkpoints could be made on large changes or when leaving the page.

podiki 5y ago

When I see this all I can think of is Emacs and org-mode, harness all that power and that existing ecosystem. At a quick glance seems to be a lot of what this does.

crispyalmond 5y ago
My thoughts exactly. Org-mode just works and has so much functionality that I haven't even discovered yet. I am currently using it for notes and TODOs.
forgotpwd16 5y ago
The entire system is very elementary compared to org-mode. This is good for some (people that wanna try this approach since it's simpler and mostly works fine), bad for others (people accustomed to all features org provides).
dv35z 5y ago
Hope its OK to share a quick tech rage rant? So, gotta jump in here and say - I'm going thru the "Let's figure out Emacs, Org-Mode, Org-Roam - get my todo, calendar, files, notes all in one... somewhat coherent system". I've got my Emacs cheatsheets, and all that. I'm on the journey. But I can't help but think - some one really needs to do the UNIX->Next->MacOS of this. That is, figure out a solution that works, standardize it, make it easy. I saw a guy made an Raspberry-Pi, with Emacs, & an e-ink display. When someone makes a "personal productivity device" - some sort of E-Ink Palm Pilot + Blackberry keyboard + Easy mode Emacs-org/notes/todo/calendar/rolodex, that syncs to your laptop, phone, refrigerator calendar... that's going to be huge. The reason I am going through this journey is because I am treating it as a life-investment. Getting your personal productivity / information systems in order, getting that problem solved... for LIFE. It would be a huge win. So despite the pain, I'm sold on the benefits, have many people who have told me about the impact of org-mode etc on their life. So, I'm taking that at face value, trying to actually apply this advice to my own life (instead of reading about it, agreeing, and then taking 0 action on it). The irony of not prioritizing setting up a reliable TODO system is not lost on me... It's a daily laugh, as I Google search yet another Emacs package manager, or diagnose random Lisp errors - this programming language I have never used before, but this important tool requires me to know in order to... configure a note template. What. I know there are historical reasons for the various keyboard shortcuts. But all these "arcane" (I know, "different") keyboard shortcuts for "Yank", "Buffers". Emacs keeps on opening windows. I can barely remember how to even save a file & quit. Don't worry - got Doom Emacs! I'm getting it, but still a whole 'nother set of "non standard" keyboard shortcuts. I genuinely appreciate the various bloggers and Youtube videos out there, where people explain their system, walk you through installing & configuring stuff. But I can't help to think. This system is so powerful. So many smart people working on it, making plug-ins for it, creating systems for it. Where is the smart person who can tie it together as a holistic system, make it EASY, and still be open source. Am I missing something? I'm thinking "Green" mode on the SLR camera. It works. If you want to tweak, you can experiment with aperture/shutter priority as you learn when/why to use it. Ok, thanks for hearing out my Emacs rant. (as I go smoke a J, and go back to learning Emacs)

hanlec 5y ago

Whatever system I have (tried to) used over time, I've run into the following challenges: 1. how to deal with old tasks (are they relevant anymore? should they be removed?). 2. connecting tasks to their related source and needed information to act For the former, the accumulation of old stuff has consistently led to less and less usage of the system and as a result to a continuously decreasing trust in that system. Adopting a new solution has given the feeling of a better system with better chances to success; but it has mainly been about having a (temporarily) new clean inbox.

slk500 5y ago
in emacs org-mode you can archive some tasks, text - it will move it to another text file ex. archive.txt with the timestamp or archiving it. Beside this keep your file in git. so you delete text & make explicit commit message that something was removed.
iib 5y ago
Some people that were interested in their productivity that I read seemed to have systems that regularly cleaned their todo lists for old tasks. Stephen King [1] advises aspiring writers not to note their writing prompts, as the best ideas should pop into your head regularly, or nullprogram.com [2] programming in /tmp/. So maybe the way to go is to have a logrotate-like on your input file. [1] On writing -- Stephen King, although I read it a very long time ago and would not be able to point to a specific page. [2] I searched the web but can't find the exact citation, and there is no search feature on the website.
fellowniusmonk 5y ago
Yeah, I've been thinking about how to tackle this and I am convinced any personal note taking app should have an archive all and start over button. A clean sheet is intimidating when you don't know where to start but is a hard requirement downstream once your chosen abstraction starts to break under the weight.
raju 5y ago
@luxpir mentioned Obsidian in another comment [1] and it might be what you are looking for, in particular with a community plugin called Obsidian Dataview [2]. Dataview uses JavaScript as a query language and can query the Obsidian "vault" and create different views. Another tool to look at is Logseq [3], which is essentially an outliner (supports both MarkDown and Org syntax), but supports a rather simplistic TODO management system. The benefit here is exactly what you describe—as you work in Logseq, you can create Todos, thereby connecting the task to the related source and any context that surrounds the todo. Furthermore, Logseq also allows for queries [4], allowing you to query your "knowledge graph", which you can embed in other pages. Both Obsidian and Logseq store your files locally, so they can be easily version-controlled (In fact, Logseq routines commits your files for you). [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30747131 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30747131 [2] https://github.com/blacksmithgu/obsidian-dataview https://github.com/blacksmithgu/obsidian-dataview [3] https://logseq.com/ https://logseq.com/ [4] https://logseq.github.io/#/page/Queries https://logseq.github.io/#/page/Queries [Edited for formatting]

forgotpwd16 5y ago

Why name folders with starting @ seeing there's nothing else in the directory they reside?

wim 5y ago

Interesting, I also keep coming back to text files for productivity, because of the speed and simplicity. Some of the points the author mentions though like due dates, a journal/schedule and version history still aren’t really solved very well I think. Not to mention collaborating in a team that way (not a requirement for the author I think, but something I could use myself). I actually tried simply using VSCode for a while with just a plain text "todo.txt", "schedule.txt" and "projects.txt", but that didn’t scale very well (also didn't really get things like autocomplete to work properly). If anyone’s interested, we decided to see if we can actually solve this ourselves and are building an editor/IDE from scratch now, but specifically for "todo.txt" (https://thymer.com https://thymer.com).

bleachedsleet 5y ago
Cool looking project...have a beta I could try yet?
- wim 5y ago
  Thanks! Not yet, still working on getting a beta out asap

lambda_dn 5y ago

Org mode does all this but 100x better.

danuker 5y ago
And also with a 100x learning curve.
- czernobog 5y ago
  org mode is alright but learning emacs has been a real deal for me.
  - Oreb 5y ago
    I’m the opposite. I love emacs and have been using it since the previous millennium, but no matter how often I try, I just can’t get comfortable with org-mode. I spend far more time looking up how to do stuff than I do writing, and I never seem to be able to remember anything.
- Groxx 5y ago
  And also a single un-specified implementation. (though I am thrilled that it is in progress! https://orgmode.org/worg/dev/org-syntax.html https://orgmode.org/worg/dev/org-syntax.html )
- kkfx 5y ago
  Hum, meh, personally I've jumped the ship from Unix to Emacs few years ago: in a month Emacs became mine most used application, in another or two my windows manager (EXWM) and if few more months I decide to devastate my decades-old hyper-curated home taxonomy to put all my files in a cache-like tree handled via org-attach, accessing them mostly via search&narrow before with linkmarks + manual org-mode, after with org-roam. I have almost anything in Emacs form emails to personal finance, files, agenda, ... everything integrated in ways no other tool I know of can give... The learning curve exists of course, but it's not that hard if you have a bit of IT background and in any case it pay back so much that's absolutely worth the initial "capex"...
- 5y ago

smusamashah 5y ago

I have been using OneNote after going through a bunch of plaintext tools and I have never been at more ease with dumping info from my head for later retrieval. OneNote makes it as fluent as possible with as little resistance that no other tool offers. New version of OneNote (metro style) has been bitten by designers though like all good things in recent times. Also, it does not have customizable shortcut keys making formatting code snippets a non-trivial process. Every page is a white board which no other tool does and that's where it's power is. Plaintext can't beat that.

yardshop 5y ago
I love OneNote, it's my primary note taking tool, although I'm eagerly looking for a more open alternative. I love pasting in screen clips and shots, and being able to extract text from them when I need to. I also love arbitrary indentation and use that for structuring my notes. This is something that Markdown can't do, and I have yet to find any kind of markup-supporting text format that doesn't treat indented text as pre-formatted. I dislike that newer versions force syncing with Office 365 and have reduced the file format flexibility of older versions, like saving the notebook on a network share, or exporting to an MHT file if one wants. I still use the Office 2016 version and am hesitant to try newer versions again. I have numerous notebooks on many different PCs and want to coalesce them at some point, but am not comfortable putting them all on Office 365. But for day to day note taking, it's the lowest friction tool I've found that comes closest to my preferences.
visviva 5y ago
I've become a heavy user of OneNote recently as well, but I'm always in search of ways to improve my workflow. I have yet to fall into a consistent pattern of usage.

jen729w 5y ago

Not necessarily a ‘productivity hack’ in that it neither relates to productivity nor is a hack, but in our latest side project my partner and I have a need to share textual data about the various episodes/lessons that we’re creating. Of course any number of notes systems allow one to do that, and I have my very own system of organisation that helps [0], but we ended up, at my partner’s suggestion, just saving individual .txt files in the folders containing the episodes. [0]: https://johnnydecimal.com https://johnnydecimal.com Nothing new here of course, it’s what we all used to do when it was the only option. But it feels like it’s been so long since I just fired up TextEdit, typed the words, and File-SaveAs’d it in to a folder. It’s weirdly refreshing and works really well. I noted that it was my partner’s suggestion because she’s been learning Markdown, and as an ex-professional-writer (medical/patient) is overjoyed that she doesn’t have to use Word. When we were looking for a solution she said, well why don’t we just save a file there. So simple that I’d missed it.

ajuc 5y ago

Not exactly TODO but I do something similar. I have a directory with text files and images named like: 2022_03_20_1_short_description.txt or 2022_03_20_2_config_screenshot.png The names are mostly to group images with related text files when I grep later. I create the file at the start of each work day, write a few lines of TODO for the task I'm working on, and whenever I copy-paste something that seems relevant - I paste it there and leave it with a few empty lines as separator. If image is better I screenshot only the relevant part and possibly add some notes with paint and save it in that directory. When I investigate some error I paste stacktrace there. And when I find solution - I paste the link or the git commit or JIRA task or description. If I do several unrelated things in the same day I sometimes create several files, but it doesn't matter that much. It saved me A LOT of time. A quick grep and I have all the context of some error that last happened 8 months ago.

nameless_me 5y ago
Some may think it primitive but your workflow is fast, efficient, backups up easily (I write a simple DOS batch file which copies all new or updated files to a USB stick) and backs up to the cloud easily as well. Grepping to find files by date is easy and if a more detailed document had to be generated, you have pandoc or Libreoffice to produce PDFs using those source data files.
anon2020dot00 5y ago
I do something close to this but with even less organization up-front. I label my text file as <day>.txt, like 21.txt, since it is under a month folder. For images, I take screenshots with the Snag-It software which automatically assigns a time-based filename to the screenshot and stores it in a central directory. So, at the start, my text files and screenshots have basic filenames which are time-based. Later-on, I'll create an index for the text files with a Google Doc; an index which is a basic list of the text files with some brief bullet-point comments describing each one. Actually, for text files, I just describe it with a comma-delimited list of tags/titles per file.

candiddevmike 5y ago

I don't think I can be productive with \r\n line endings.

kkfx 5y ago

Plain-text means just something that can be manipulated easily, witch is damn good. But tools to properly and comfortably manipulate text are needed. For me the solution is Emacs that let me combine almost anything, access almost anything in a snap. It's a bit buggy sometimes, not really crafted for such usage, but even with such issues is still far above all other tools I know (and being a sysadmin I have see many software) to a point that I've developed the idea that after Xerox and LispM we humans completely lost the way of IT development just to lock users out of the real potential IT gives...

xenodium 5y ago

Plain text can be super versatile (task-tracking and note-taking are great examples), but equally important are the guarantees that your content is truly yours (no lock-in). With all these plain text posts surfacing regularly, I'd love for the lesser-known org markup (https://orgmode.org https://orgmode.org) to gain more adoption. It's a real power-house. Its Emacs origin may put some off, but it's plain text, so your content can be ingested/consumed by either regular text editors or any app focusing on specific user-journeys. I built two org-powered apps for iOS myself: https://plainorg.com https://plainorg.com https://flathabits.com https://flathabits.com There are other great ones out there: https://beorg.app https://beorg.app https://braintool.org https://braintool.org https://easyorgmode.com https://easyorgmode.com https://logseq.com https://logseq.com https://organice.200ok.ch https://organice.200ok.ch https://orgro.org https://orgro.org http://orgzly.com http://orgzly.com Thanks to Karl Voit for driving org markup awareness outside of Emacs via Orgdown https://gitlab.com/publicvoit/orgdown https://gitlab.com/publicvoit/orgdown. He's also got a great post showcasing org strengths at https://karl-voit.at/2017/09/23/orgmode-as-markup-only https://karl-voit.at/2017/09/23/orgmode-as-markup-only

afarviral 5y ago
Orgmode is awesome but it's frustratingly difficult to use outside Emacs, and using Emacs isn't an option or productive for the vast majority of people, far, far too much cognitive overhead. Im hoping for a hybrid that is easier to read as plain markup but has the extensibility of org.
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  I've found Obsidian pretty great, but it's not opensource. It has a pretty alive community as well and it's all just text and pictures in the end, so it stays in your control.
  - afarviral 5y ago
    I'm a big fan of obsidian and use it for all my notes already but being basically just text, links, and pictures, it's easy to long for the power of org-mode.

Flankk 5y ago

David Allen is a leader of The Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness. Between cargo cult and actual cults I have a low opinion of programmers in general. Programmers think everything needs a system or an abstraction. I guess when all you have is a hammer everything is a nail.

pmarreck 5y ago
The guy who wrote the article is Michael Descy. The article mentions GTD a few times, THAT is what David Allen is responsible for, but the article also mentioned the Autofocus system, which was a new concept to me and which I am now quite fascinated by. > cults... programmers I've been coding for 20+ years and have yet to see any correlation between programmers and any cult (cargo or otherwise... ok maybe cargo SOMEtimes, but certainly nothing else)
- Flankk 5y ago
  GTD seminars are used to induct members into the cult. It's analogous to Scientology and their ideas on productivity. The audience for GTD is mostly programmers due to corporations sponsoring the seminars. Everything programmers do is ideological. Programming is also hard which is why coders are susceptible to scams. Uncle Bob and OOP principles are very cult-like as well although the methodology has proven itself suboptimal and convoluted.
  - pmarreck 5y ago
    Any thoughts on the Autofocus method? It seems to have had a heyday I missed about 10-11 years ago with apps made very specific to it kind of being end-of-lifed as of 5+ years ago (sadly), but it looks useful (and not at all culty)
forgotmypw17 5y ago
>The Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness Thanks for mentioning this, I hadn't heard about it before, and it seems like a great practice.

UberFly 5y ago

I like the todo.txt concept and have given it a go for a while, most recently using the really nice frontend UI "Sleek". I ended up moving away due to the limited functionality of todo.txt as a whole. I needed to be able to add simple notes to my todos at times and it's just not possible or easy to accomplish this basic need with todo.txt.

mch82 5y ago

How come we don’t have plaintext symbols for the formatting basics: bold, italic, color? Maybe we could expand Unicode based on lessons learned from Markdown/typesetting & the formatting characters could be added as non-printing characters. Visibility could be toggled with other whitespace characters.

zozbot234 5y ago
You can use the standard ANSI escapes, if no other markup is defined. Adding new formatting codes via Unicode just wouldn't change much.

luxpir 5y ago

I'll be first to mention obsidian here. I solved my overloading/losing faith in systems issue with it by using a daily template. At the bottom of which are all the tasks in daily notes, generated by an inline script, another dynamic list of tasks for my freelance work. I could add my #ideas or #content lists too, but they are stored elsewhere. I add the #inv tag to my freelance work and that moves them to the "to invoice" list. When finally checked they disappear, but all still stored on their initial log date (all searchable, of course). So long lists of crud don't get the chance to accumulate, and ideas are easily searchable either in dynamic lists or just using search. On the same page are mental/physical subheadings so a small bit of journalling takes place. I never look back at it, but it's there. This beats all previous attempts at organisational systems. Obsidian has a great mobile app. Syncthing keeps them updated. Previous systems were Trello (perma loss of everything archived), big single plaintext file (soon becomes a heaving mess), paper (no search and easy for things to sink/not be surfaced). Taskwarrior, which was great for a long time, but tricky to sync and no additional features like journalling, swipe file creation, flashcards, search, mobile app (sync to cli env on Android was clunky). And surely more I'm forgetting. Side benefits: all plaintext, whatever happens to obsidian. Graph view of all interconnected ideas. Easy resurfacing of old but relevant ideas through search and backlink sidebar. Could import my attempts at using vimwiki with zero conversion required. Much better UX than Vim. Great place to also write content, use wordcount, sprint, wordcount goal, calendar features etc. For me the days of Vimwiki and org-mode are now numbered. Even most other note taking software tbh, for anyone OK with syncing their own stuff and figuring out a little bit of basic script syntax for the dynamic lists within the plaintext files.

itsjloh 5y ago
I'm a recent Obsidian convert, absolutely love it and its the only note taking app that I've managed to stick to past a few weeks. How do you use custom scripts in it? I'm aware you can make plugins and things for it but I'd love to be able to write up a script or two to update some shortcodes for some nice weekly stats in a few places if possible
- luxpir 5y ago
  There is the full-on dataview plugin, lets you do anything in JS. I just use the tasks plugin query engine, which is plenty for me, but it sounds like you would need dataview. The forum has loads of very well developed examples.

syngrog66 5y ago

I've been a hardcore text-and-CLI-first-maybe-only guy for decades, as a workflow optimization rule. I coined my own private little name for it too: CLIFMO. I have my own development process and architecture strategy all associated with that name/abbrev. (Which I might write down and share one day, haha.) one thing I love about having a plaintext bias when working is that many opportunities arise to design ad hoc DSLs, as I need them. when they begin to feel like a net win its also fairly easy to start blurring the lines between text notes and working code, esp with shell scripts and langs like Python

posharma 5y ago

Use the tool that best suits your workflow and that's most convenient to you. There's no need to be super enthusiastic about plaintext.

twobitshifter 5y ago

Has anybody had success with plain text working in teams in business? I prefer it myself but teaching everyone I work with markdown, org-mode, git etc seems like a big undertaking. For example, we have a specification in development and that spec lives in Microsoft word. Plain text would make tracking the changes and collaborating on it much easier IMO, but word has it’s own abilities to do that. And with plain text you give up the wysiwyg formatting which people are accustomed to. Perhaps writing specifications in confluence would be better than plain text or word - who knows. It’s likely only because of my bias that I think plain text is a reasonable choice.

sharikous 5y ago

I believe plaintext/markdown as a format is a bit overblown, though I am glad there is a wealth of tools and tips around it. Just as an example as a Hebrew speaker who regularly uses math - MD editors that support both RTL and math rendering are difficult to find. And that's squarely inside the domain of a "knowledge worker".

AlanYx 5y ago
Emacs supports both RTL and math rendering (and not just in preview but inline too). I think this kind of flexibility is part of what is driving the popularity of plaintext… there are dozens of modern web apps for everything, but if you need an idiosyncratic combination of features, old-school tools are sometimes one of the better options.

pmarreck 5y ago

> Windows, in my opinion, is far behind Mac OS X, iOS, and Android, in having thoughtfully designed and efficient software—both in general, and in particular for writing, organization, and task management. Jesus, I thought it was just me and my long-time Apple bias (as a person who grudgingly uses Windows a lot of the time)

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captn3m0 5y ago

Related: I maintain a list of products/projects etc that let you maintain more and more things in plaintext. https://github.com/captn3m0/plaintext-everything https://github.com/captn3m0/plaintext-everything (Contributions welcome)

nemoniac 5y ago

Put "...on Windows" in the title.

OtomotO 5y ago

People arguing about proprietary formats being supported by other applications and backups plus checksums being a solution against bitrot miss the major point: Simplicity. If "simple" text is all you need to fulfill a certain goal, just stop there. Any system should be as complex as absolutely necessary, not a shred more. And yes, plain text is good enough for a very many usecases. KISS people, KISS ;)

Kinrany 5y ago
Bytes are certainly simpler than Unicode.
- OtomotO 5y ago
  If in the end I have to show ß or Ø or È it doesn't matter how it's encoded, but I would certainly argue for a unicode standard to be better than some proprietary format. KISS doesn't mean that you can't have nice features, it means to have nice features with meaningful complexity

lesterzone 5y ago

I'm using a small command line tool developed in go, I have a base.md file and when I run personal init will open a new file for 'today' using base.md I can also create a post/note/idea even mind map using markdown. I've been using plain text for about 3 years, totally recommend it. bonus tip, I use grep to find content in my files. and yes, I have a personal backup command :D