6 ms·

Plain text journaling in Vim

254 points by gigatexal 3y ago

jacknews 3y ago
Looks fantastic of course, but I'm not sure it survives contact with reality. Just 7-8 tasks per week?
tester457 3y ago
The end result is pretty.
slowmovintarget 3y ago
Cue Emacs Org Mode argument. Also, shouldn't it be cal -m 1 In zsh it complains without the extra argument.
- smorrebrod 3y ago
  Wouldn't `cal -m 1` show the year 0001 ?
  - I_complete_me 3y ago
    Depends. I have zsh running on Linux and Mac. On Linux, smorrebrod wins. And on Mac slowmovingtarget wins.
    - slowmovintarget 3y ago
      I tried it on Mac... so I guess that's the difference. Thanks.
  - mmcdermott 3y ago
    On macOS, `cal -m 1` prints out January 2023. The man page reads "-m month Display the specified month." Googling for man pages gives other usages for the `-m` switch (like https://linux.die.net/man/1/cal https://linux.die.net/man/1/cal) so it probably depends on system.
- fransje26 3y ago
  Bash also doesn't seem to like the missing argument..
bachmeier 3y ago
In my experience with plain text systems like this, it gets hard to navigate and query things for review quickly. Once you add a tool to remove closed items, and another tool to organize into groups, and another tool to view your queries, you no longer have simplicity.
lemontheme 3y ago
This reminds me of the plain text bujo I kept for about 1–2 years a few years back, only much prettier. Mine was a single long file that I appended to each day. Like in the post, I used pretty standard Unixy tools. I could search, aggregate, and bulk update. The rest was based on conventions and discipline. And migrating to new conventions was doable with a throwaway script. All in all, it was a liberating experience. Where it fell apart, and where I expect this approach might fall apart also: - While it worked really well on desktop, I didn't find a way to make it translate to mobile. Sure, I could just edit the plain text file, but that's not enough when you have hundreds of todos scattered around. - I had to remember too much about how all the different scripts worked together. I kept forgetting the commands I'd defined, especially when I was tired or stressed. My middleroad these days is NotePlan. It gives me what I liked about bullet journaling (for me it's the 'rapid logging' part) but presents it in a sleepless night-proof UI that works well on iOS at the same time.
- DragonStrength 3y ago
  I found NotePlan and discovered an app which was a much better version of what I was already doing: daily Markdown notes. That if I ever decide I don't like the way the developer is taking the app I can just delete the app and keep using the Markdown files as-is is the killer feature.
vit-baisa 3y ago
I like it and believe this is the right and sustainable approach. For journaling I use the same directory structure but it is also a Hugo site so it can be simply turned into a blog. I have also other categories in my system (notes which serve as blog articles; people which is my personal CRM where I also maintain my genealogy tree data; songs where I collect my favourite songs with chords and lyrics; music where I maintain my compositions; books I've read with reviews and scores etc.). Hugo supports YAML preambules so you can add whatever metadata you wish to your files. Everything is in Git. Content is in Markdown. It's a matter of a one-line command to get my weight stats or the last time I met someone or how many books I've read last year. I don't need to know these but it's easy to get that. I have some bash scripts/aliases, e.g. to write a journal entry I use command `j` which will open four last days in vertical windows in Vim (and create the missing files if necessary and commit the changes then). To seach any file inside the system I use fzf. You can simply use grep and other tools to navigate and work with the system. The public part is published by building the site and copying the data to my server. A matter of a few key strokes. I guess it's time to describe it in more detail on my website.
localghost3000 3y ago
Highly recommend nb[0] for this type of stuff. I've been using it for a few years now and am still getting surprised by all the stuff it can do. Some others have said it but the only problem with a lot of these systems is that by their very nature they are a better experience on a desktop than on mobile. Joplin is the only one I've used that even attempts to solve that problem. Even when you have one that works on mobile its a second class experience IMO. I used to try really hard to find a note capture system that I loved that worked in both environments. These days I just use apple notes on mobile and nb on desktop. [0] https://xwmx.github.io/nb/ https://xwmx.github.io/nb/
- hengheng 3y ago
  That does look cool. Would this work fine if presented with my Obsidian "vault", eg a folder full of markdown files? Looks like both apps like to operate on the same data.
  - localghost3000 3y ago
    I've used obsidian with nb before but you can't just open nb inside your vault and have it immediately work. nb uses .index files at the root of each directory to know what to display in the cli (I assume so it doesn't have to do a ton of I/O operations). You'd probably need to spend a bit of time understanding that stuff so you can write up a script or something to coordinate between the two. I ultimately just ditched obsidian and went with my afore mentioned apple notes/nb hybrid approach.
    - hengheng 3y ago
      Ha, thanks!
- bbor 3y ago
  In terms of “just giving up and taking simple mobile notes” I can also endorse Google Keep iOS - natural affordances match my typical eng/Phil related use cases better than Apple notes.
BasedAnon 3y ago
echo '#!/usr/bin/env nano' > notes && sudo chmod +x notes This is how I write notes, and it's served me well for years.
chrismorgan 3y ago
> We can clean this up with “abbreviations” (:h abbreviations): It’s probably almost a decade since I last used an abbreviation; I consistently found I just didn’t quite like them, and migrated to other ways of doing things. It was digraphs at first, still a Vim feature, and then Compose key sequences, which is where I’ve stayed ever since, preferring them mostly because they work everywhere, not just Vim. Now I type apostrophes, quotation marks, dashes, and other interesting things as I go perfectly casually, and would hate to be without a Compose key. (I’ve typed every non-ASCII character in this comment with my Compose key—just as well I still remembered · even though I practically never use it any more.) > You can use x and o as well, but × (U+00D7, MULTIPLICATION SIGN) and · (U+00B7, MIDDLE DOT) are more … gourmet. I’d go more gourmet than that: I use • (U+2022 BULLET) and ‹ugh, gobbled by HN› (U+2713 CHECK MARK) for lists. If you really wanted a cross, you could also go with ‹ugh, gobbled by HN› (U+2717 BALLOT X). The ordering holds, either way: 0x2022 < 0x2713, though I cringe at unbridled sorting of these lines. (I do all my own writing in a lightweight markup language I’ve been developing, one property of which is that it leans on CSS Counter Styles for lists for spectacular matching of source and compiled result, so that you can write “(i) ”, “17. ”, “• ”, “‹CHECK MARK› ”, &c. and get matching appearance in the HTML output—or will, when I finally get round to finishing the parser and implementing HTML conversion. I write lists with mingled •, and bullets and it’s great.) Anyway: back to the abbreviations matter: you could also enter all these characters with digraphs (CTRL-K …) or Compose key sequences (Compose …, but since your keyboard lacks a Compose key you’ll need to map one—I use RAlt on my current laptop because that’s conveniently positioned, but I really wish my spacebar was just split into at least three keys): • · is digraph .M or ~. and Compose sequence .- or .^ or ^. • × is digraph *X or /\ and Compose sequence xx • • is digraph oo and Compose sequence .= • ‹CHECK MARK› is digraph OK and a popular Compose sequence is @/ (present in kragen’s list, as included out of the box by WinCompose, but not standard on other platforms) • ‹BALLOT X› is digraph XX and a popular Compose sequence is @X You can define your own Vim digraphs too (:digraph), and make your own ~/.XCompose to set your own Compose sequences.
- WithinReason 3y ago
  For VSCode users who wandered into a vim thread wondering how to write these, there is a plug-in for that: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=GuidoTapia2.unicode-math-vscode https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=GuidoTap... With the list of Unicode characters supported here: https://github.com/mvoidex/UnicodeMath/blob/master/table.md https://github.com/mvoidex/UnicodeMath/blob/master/table.md
r29vzg2 3y ago
Whenever I see systems like this I am left wondering what people do on mobile? Are you never in the need to write a note or create a task when you're away from the computer?
- bloopernova 3y ago
  I use the Android app Orgzly. It edits org mode text files, and syncs them with my WebDAV shared folder. Works pretty well, except for those times you don't have data.
- Hedepig 3y ago
  I have managed to get doom emacs working on termux. I presume the same is possible with vim.
- marginalia_nu 3y ago
  My fingers are too big to write much of anything on a touch keyboard, so I have to make due.
  - 0xEF 3y ago
    I feel you. If you look at my (brief) HN history, you see a lot of fat-thumbing while I'm on my lunch break.
- 0xEF 3y ago
  I use a small notebook and Fisher Space Pen. To be honest, it just feels more comfortable with the way my brain is wired. I tend to remember things better when I write instead of type, and I jotva lot of stuff in the margins as thoughts start to flow, where others might find note-taking apps more suited to their style. It really just depends on how you process information.
  - Leires 3y ago
    I'm the same way but I use a hobonichi journal with a frixion erasable ink pen. It flows much smoother. I used to use a moleskine with fisher pen but I kept having to go over lines again. Maybe it works better in space.
jon-wood 3y ago
As much as I love the idea of them I've found systems like these never quite work for me in the real world. There's always a ticketing system for my employer where that stuff lives, and for personal stuff I absolutely need first class mobile support because that's generally the device I have with me when I remember something I need to do. After many years I've eventually landed on using [work ticket tracker] for work tracking, Apple Reminders for todo lists which are rarely complex items, and Logseq for journaling. My journal really is just that, I rarely go back to previous entries, but I find it helpful to spend a bit of time each day just noting down what I did and how I felt about it. I sometimes joke that this is my insurance policy in case the Police knock on my door and ask me what I did on the 12th of March this year.
- olivertaylor 3y ago
  I arrived at exactly the same conclusion, but I use Notes for my todo list (I like mixing checklists and notes in one document) and leaving reminders for… you know, reminders. I honestly enjoy it less than some of the more complex plain text systems I’ve used/built in the past but it has the advantage of actually being practical for me.
- acidburnNSA 3y ago
  Huge fan of Logseq as well. I told a few folks about it at work and they're also quick believers. Very powerful and perfectly simple.
Aperocky 3y ago
Plug of basically the same idea except as a pip package: https://github.com/Aperocky/diarycli https://github.com/Aperocky/diarycli `pip install diarycli` Alternatively there is a shell version if you are averse to python/pip package manager as well: https://github.com/Aperocky/diaryman/blob/master/diaryman.sh https://github.com/Aperocky/diaryman/blob/master/diaryman.sh I've been using this for years, it doesn't have any fancy features - it only reliably opens up/create today's diary in vim whenever I type `diary` in command line. with some minor utilities. It is life changing - having `diary` where I can type my thoughts into whenever. I maintain a separate one both for work and life - and both are proving invaluable.
- candyman 3y ago
  This is an interesting way to do this. I've been using Sublime lately and it's been okay but I need some organization. Does this allow something like "diary [name] [text] where you can add text to any diary with that name and if there is none it creates a new one? I will look at this in more detail next weekend when I am off from work.
  - Aperocky 3y ago
    this is basically exactly what it does. It looks through the folder (i.e. year/month/date.md) and try to find whether today's diary exist. If it does exist it just opens it, otherwise it creates it. The script actually accept other terminal editors if you edit a single line in the package. I imagine it will be easy to change to use sublime as well.
robbintt 3y ago
I have been plain text journalling in vim for 18 months. I use a single file. Each day, at the bottom of the file, I put the date, then content. I use this system at work. I do actually use the same concept of putting `TODO` `WIP` or `DONE` at the beginning of each task line, and I am usually using a task list with subheadings on any given day.
- Aperocky 3y ago
  Let a simple package organize the folder structure and date for you: https://github.com/Aperocky/diarycli https://github.com/Aperocky/diarycli Or shell if you prefer that: https://github.com/Aperocky/diaryman/blob/master/diaryman.sh https://github.com/Aperocky/diaryman/blob/master/diaryman.sh Been using this for 5 years+, and hopefully for decades more.
  - robbintt 3y ago
    I will take a look -- however, since I only use a single file, it may not be needed.
- koch 3y ago
  Sounds like you might be writing markwhen (though it expects a colon after each date or date range) https://github.com/mark-when/markwhen https://github.com/mark-when/markwhen
  - robbintt 3y ago
    Adding a layer on top would defeat the simplicity.
tambourine_man 3y ago
>We can now begin writing stuff down: >λ vim journal/2023/1 I think you mean 01
syngrog66 3y ago
This goes a long way for me (in broadstrokes): vi code.go README ./notes ~/notes/topic reqs design TODO script.sh ~/journal/YYYYMMDD interesting.log scratch # etc then git, rsynch, grep (etc) to heart's content main hole is on phone where vi doesnt fit well, but on there either the builtin Notes app or a thirdparty GUI text editor/viewer is fine ("sneaker shared/synched" as needed). though bias to work on laptop where total time efficiency matters
tambourine_man 3y ago
I wanna know what's that tablet on the noisy image. Are you running a terminal or do you export as PNG or HTML? Do you leave it running 24/7? Won't that burn the monitor? Nice project.
ViktorBash 3y ago
I wish I could journal straight into a directory, but I've found that it's crucial to have mobile access to my notes. That's why I mainly now write everything in Google Docs since it's simple and convenient (I tried Notion but was not a fan for various reasons I won't get into it). The only issue with Docs though is there's no Vim support of course, which has annoyed me for a while. I finally got around to building an extension for it though if anyone is interested: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/vim-for-google-docs/aphmodfjbhofkpibocbggkdfnpbpjmpp https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/vim-for-google-doc...
- dingnuts 3y ago
  Am I the only person who finds the idea of journaling into third party cloud to be an incredibly privacy-invading concept? I always think of a journal as something containing notes that are raw enough that I would be embarrassed if any other person read them. The idea of sending that over a network to be stored in plain text on someone else's server is just horrifying to me. I'd rather open JuiceSSH and log into my machine and open vim. Or I could use Synology Drive to edit a plain text document stored on my NAS. Is that really -that much- less convenient than opening a Google Doc? How inconvenient does the task need to be for me to allow random Googlers or their algorithms to read my innermost thoughts?
  - ViktorBash 3y ago
    Yeah, I don't disagree. The notes I'm putting in Google Docs usually err on the side of being blog post ideas or things that I'd want to share with people at some point after I refine it. When it comes down to privacy for sensitive thoughts it's kind of hard to beat local files (and the inconvenience of mobile is just the price to pay).
sequoia 3y ago
I really love this. One nit I must pick, however, is with the "just-so" nature of the journal screenshots. I see something similar in pinterest-style "bullet journal"/habit tracking colourful journal layouts (example[0]). Specifically, these look nice (or work) only if your to-do list is just so, usually fairly short and with really short items on it. So the "demo" versions of these have mocked up content which fits vs. real content, which is frequently less uniform. In this article, you'll see the demo content is a lot of "buy apples" and "make apple pie," but note that no to-do items exceed 18 characters which is the maximum length to fit nicely in that layout. So if you need to "buy turkey baster" (18c) you're OK, but if you need to "return turkey baster" (21c) you've overflowed the layout. Likewise, you can "call Alexander" (15c) but "send thank you card to alexander and elizabeth" (46c) is way over budget, and you'll need to mutilate it down to "ty card alex&beth" (18c) to fit. This leads, in the example, to shortening items to something like "shopping trip," at which point too much context is lost (what if you have a second shopping trip?). Likewise, if you want to dump all the todos you can think of for the week and it's 20 or 30 small items, it's not clear that would work well in these layouts. This is not to malign this system which I think is really cool, but to suggest that it's more useful to see real and more varied content in a system like this to see how it "really looks" rather than exclusively made-to-measure content of 1-6 super-short items per list. 0: https://anjahome.com/summer-bullet-journal-ideas/#What_Is_a_Bullet_Journal https://anjahome.com/summer-bullet-journal-ideas/#What_Is_a_...
- jvanderbot 3y ago
  I agree. I suspect with some level of curmudgeonness that it's because author calls themself a pixel-artist. I have a brutalist CLI/programmer take on bullet journalling from vim, just for comparison: https://jodavaho.io/posts/bash-journalling.html https://jodavaho.io/posts/bash-journalling.html https://jodavaho.io/posts/bullet-journalling.html https://jodavaho.io/posts/bullet-journalling.html It is essentially: - One hidden folder for journal entries - Each entry is a file of the form YYYY-MM-DD.md - A bash alias will open today's file (or "yesterday" or "next thursday" or "2 weeks") using the date cli util - A few vim formatting steps make the already-well-functioning github markdown work very nicely.
  - 3y ago
gsuuon 3y ago
This is incredibly close to what I currently do, except I journal by the day and some of the markers are different (I use `-,.=*[` to give meaning to each item) and items are organized hierarchically via indents. I used to use vimwiki, then neorg, until finally realizing rolling my own simpler solution wouldn't be very hard. The syntax highlights help significantly, and linking is done via just vim's `gf`. I added a couple custom commands to auto open / generate diary entries and it became a super smooth note-taking experience for me.
tianh 3y ago
I have a journal.log (textfile) At the top i have a template command for creating a current timestamp echo $(date '+%Y/%m/%d %H:%M:%S|%a| ') #run with :!!bash directly within vim. I copy this line and run it with :!!bash to init a new entry. 2023/06/19 20:52:02|Mo| Then I write my entries as oneliners 2023/06/19 20:52:02|Mo| Its grep-able like a normal system log file 2023/06/19 20:52:02|Mo| I also use tags, so i can more easily follow 'threads' #corrupt_storage 2023/06/19 20:52:02|Mo| Bad day today #disaster
shahbaby 3y ago
Curious, why go with something like this over obsidian?
- bachmeier 3y ago
  You might not want everything in markdown format, and you might not want the extras you get with Obsidian. I put a lot of stuff into Obsidian, but sometimes the extra backticks and closing quotes and all that gets annoying. There are times you just want to open a text editor and type away.
  - collinvandyck76 3y ago
    Templates are great for this. I have templates for json/go/sh/etc formatting that i can insert using Ctrl+t, and then I'm off to the races. If you add the Templater plugin you can add custom logic such as where to place the cursor when the template is evaluated and inserted. Admittedly, getting to this point with Obsidian is a bit of effort, but being on the other side I think it's worth it. The Git plugin also automatically syncs my vault to a private github repo, so I always have my notes available from anywhere.
jvanderbot 3y ago
I use vim, git, and a very simple set of bash aliases to do bullet journalling in vim. I have since 2013. No frills, no fuss, no formatting limitations... easy to copy / change. https://jodavaho.io/posts/bash-journalling.html https://jodavaho.io/posts/bash-journalling.html https://jodavaho.io/posts/bullet-journalling.html https://jodavaho.io/posts/bullet-journalling.html
ivlad 3y ago
I wonder, why nobody mentioned vimwiki. It has diary functionality (available via <leader>w<leader>w by default) that will create dated files.
botanical 3y ago
I'm surprised there's hardly any mention of org-mode: https://orgmode.org/ https://orgmode.org/ It can be as detailed or simple as you like, with built-in date keeping functionality. This article spends a lot of time getting that part. I use it on Doom Emacs but it's available on vim too
dm319 3y ago
I like this. I use vimwiki for my notes, but I'm struggling to get any sort of todo list working these days. For a while I had some scripts that converted my vimwiki files to html and saved them to Google drive, and it would also find and extract pending todos. As people have mentioned it requires a laptop with linux and vim on it, which is not very compatible with my work (windows machines) or my phone. I wonder if buying something like a GPD pocket will solve this.

254 points by gigatexal 3y ago

jacknews 3y ago

Looks fantastic of course, but I'm not sure it survives contact with reality. Just 7-8 tasks per week?

tester457 3y ago

The end result is pretty.

slowmovintarget 3y ago

Cue Emacs Org Mode argument. Also, shouldn't it be cal -m 1 In zsh it complains without the extra argument.

smorrebrod 3y ago
Wouldn't `cal -m 1` show the year 0001 ?
- I_complete_me 3y ago
  Depends. I have zsh running on Linux and Mac. On Linux, smorrebrod wins. And on Mac slowmovingtarget wins.
  - slowmovintarget 3y ago
    I tried it on Mac... so I guess that's the difference. Thanks.
- mmcdermott 3y ago
  On macOS, `cal -m 1` prints out January 2023. The man page reads "-m month Display the specified month." Googling for man pages gives other usages for the `-m` switch (like https://linux.die.net/man/1/cal https://linux.die.net/man/1/cal) so it probably depends on system.
fransje26 3y ago
Bash also doesn't seem to like the missing argument..

bachmeier 3y ago

In my experience with plain text systems like this, it gets hard to navigate and query things for review quickly. Once you add a tool to remove closed items, and another tool to organize into groups, and another tool to view your queries, you no longer have simplicity.

lemontheme 3y ago

This reminds me of the plain text bujo I kept for about 1–2 years a few years back, only much prettier. Mine was a single long file that I appended to each day. Like in the post, I used pretty standard Unixy tools. I could search, aggregate, and bulk update. The rest was based on conventions and discipline. And migrating to new conventions was doable with a throwaway script. All in all, it was a liberating experience. Where it fell apart, and where I expect this approach might fall apart also: - While it worked really well on desktop, I didn't find a way to make it translate to mobile. Sure, I could just edit the plain text file, but that's not enough when you have hundreds of todos scattered around. - I had to remember too much about how all the different scripts worked together. I kept forgetting the commands I'd defined, especially when I was tired or stressed. My middleroad these days is NotePlan. It gives me what I liked about bullet journaling (for me it's the 'rapid logging' part) but presents it in a sleepless night-proof UI that works well on iOS at the same time.

DragonStrength 3y ago
I found NotePlan and discovered an app which was a much better version of what I was already doing: daily Markdown notes. That if I ever decide I don't like the way the developer is taking the app I can just delete the app and keep using the Markdown files as-is is the killer feature.

vit-baisa 3y ago

I like it and believe this is the right and sustainable approach. For journaling I use the same directory structure but it is also a Hugo site so it can be simply turned into a blog. I have also other categories in my system (notes which serve as blog articles; people which is my personal CRM where I also maintain my genealogy tree data; songs where I collect my favourite songs with chords and lyrics; music where I maintain my compositions; books I've read with reviews and scores etc.). Hugo supports YAML preambules so you can add whatever metadata you wish to your files. Everything is in Git. Content is in Markdown. It's a matter of a one-line command to get my weight stats or the last time I met someone or how many books I've read last year. I don't need to know these but it's easy to get that. I have some bash scripts/aliases, e.g. to write a journal entry I use command `j` which will open four last days in vertical windows in Vim (and create the missing files if necessary and commit the changes then). To seach any file inside the system I use fzf. You can simply use grep and other tools to navigate and work with the system. The public part is published by building the site and copying the data to my server. A matter of a few key strokes. I guess it's time to describe it in more detail on my website.

localghost3000 3y ago

Highly recommend nb[0] for this type of stuff. I've been using it for a few years now and am still getting surprised by all the stuff it can do. Some others have said it but the only problem with a lot of these systems is that by their very nature they are a better experience on a desktop than on mobile. Joplin is the only one I've used that even attempts to solve that problem. Even when you have one that works on mobile its a second class experience IMO. I used to try really hard to find a note capture system that I loved that worked in both environments. These days I just use apple notes on mobile and nb on desktop. [0] https://xwmx.github.io/nb/ https://xwmx.github.io/nb/

hengheng 3y ago
That does look cool. Would this work fine if presented with my Obsidian "vault", eg a folder full of markdown files? Looks like both apps like to operate on the same data.
- localghost3000 3y ago
  I've used obsidian with nb before but you can't just open nb inside your vault and have it immediately work. nb uses .index files at the root of each directory to know what to display in the cli (I assume so it doesn't have to do a ton of I/O operations). You'd probably need to spend a bit of time understanding that stuff so you can write up a script or something to coordinate between the two. I ultimately just ditched obsidian and went with my afore mentioned apple notes/nb hybrid approach.
  - hengheng 3y ago
    Ha, thanks!
bbor 3y ago
In terms of “just giving up and taking simple mobile notes” I can also endorse Google Keep iOS - natural affordances match my typical eng/Phil related use cases better than Apple notes.

BasedAnon 3y ago

echo '#!/usr/bin/env nano' > notes && sudo chmod +x notes This is how I write notes, and it's served me well for years.

chrismorgan 3y ago

> We can clean this up with “abbreviations” (:h abbreviations): It’s probably almost a decade since I last used an abbreviation; I consistently found I just didn’t quite like them, and migrated to other ways of doing things. It was digraphs at first, still a Vim feature, and then Compose key sequences, which is where I’ve stayed ever since, preferring them mostly because they work everywhere, not just Vim. Now I type apostrophes, quotation marks, dashes, and other interesting things as I go perfectly casually, and would hate to be without a Compose key. (I’ve typed every non-ASCII character in this comment with my Compose key—just as well I still remembered · even though I practically never use it any more.) > You can use x and o as well, but × (U+00D7, MULTIPLICATION SIGN) and · (U+00B7, MIDDLE DOT) are more … gourmet. I’d go more gourmet than that: I use • (U+2022 BULLET) and ‹ugh, gobbled by HN› (U+2713 CHECK MARK) for lists. If you really wanted a cross, you could also go with ‹ugh, gobbled by HN› (U+2717 BALLOT X). The ordering holds, either way: 0x2022 < 0x2713, though I cringe at unbridled sorting of these lines. (I do all my own writing in a lightweight markup language I’ve been developing, one property of which is that it leans on CSS Counter Styles for lists for spectacular matching of source and compiled result, so that you can write “(i) ”, “17. ”, “• ”, “‹CHECK MARK› ”, &c. and get matching appearance in the HTML output—or will, when I finally get round to finishing the parser and implementing HTML conversion. I write lists with mingled •, and bullets and it’s great.) Anyway: back to the abbreviations matter: you could also enter all these characters with digraphs (CTRL-K …) or Compose key sequences (Compose …, but since your keyboard lacks a Compose key you’ll need to map one—I use RAlt on my current laptop because that’s conveniently positioned, but I really wish my spacebar was just split into at least three keys): • · is digraph .M or ~. and Compose sequence .- or .^ or ^. • × is digraph *X or /\ and Compose sequence xx • • is digraph oo and Compose sequence .= • ‹CHECK MARK› is digraph OK and a popular Compose sequence is @/ (present in kragen’s list, as included out of the box by WinCompose, but not standard on other platforms) • ‹BALLOT X› is digraph XX and a popular Compose sequence is @X You can define your own Vim digraphs too (:digraph), and make your own ~/.XCompose to set your own Compose sequences.

WithinReason 3y ago
For VSCode users who wandered into a vim thread wondering how to write these, there is a plug-in for that: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=GuidoTapia2.unicode-math-vscode https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=GuidoTap... With the list of Unicode characters supported here: https://github.com/mvoidex/UnicodeMath/blob/master/table.md https://github.com/mvoidex/UnicodeMath/blob/master/table.md

r29vzg2 3y ago

Whenever I see systems like this I am left wondering what people do on mobile? Are you never in the need to write a note or create a task when you're away from the computer?

bloopernova 3y ago
I use the Android app Orgzly. It edits org mode text files, and syncs them with my WebDAV shared folder. Works pretty well, except for those times you don't have data.
Hedepig 3y ago
I have managed to get doom emacs working on termux. I presume the same is possible with vim.
marginalia_nu 3y ago
My fingers are too big to write much of anything on a touch keyboard, so I have to make due.
- 0xEF 3y ago
  I feel you. If you look at my (brief) HN history, you see a lot of fat-thumbing while I'm on my lunch break.
0xEF 3y ago
I use a small notebook and Fisher Space Pen. To be honest, it just feels more comfortable with the way my brain is wired. I tend to remember things better when I write instead of type, and I jotva lot of stuff in the margins as thoughts start to flow, where others might find note-taking apps more suited to their style. It really just depends on how you process information.
- Leires 3y ago
  I'm the same way but I use a hobonichi journal with a frixion erasable ink pen. It flows much smoother. I used to use a moleskine with fisher pen but I kept having to go over lines again. Maybe it works better in space.

jon-wood 3y ago

As much as I love the idea of them I've found systems like these never quite work for me in the real world. There's always a ticketing system for my employer where that stuff lives, and for personal stuff I absolutely need first class mobile support because that's generally the device I have with me when I remember something I need to do. After many years I've eventually landed on using [work ticket tracker] for work tracking, Apple Reminders for todo lists which are rarely complex items, and Logseq for journaling. My journal really is just that, I rarely go back to previous entries, but I find it helpful to spend a bit of time each day just noting down what I did and how I felt about it. I sometimes joke that this is my insurance policy in case the Police knock on my door and ask me what I did on the 12th of March this year.

olivertaylor 3y ago
I arrived at exactly the same conclusion, but I use Notes for my todo list (I like mixing checklists and notes in one document) and leaving reminders for… you know, reminders. I honestly enjoy it less than some of the more complex plain text systems I’ve used/built in the past but it has the advantage of actually being practical for me.
acidburnNSA 3y ago
Huge fan of Logseq as well. I told a few folks about it at work and they're also quick believers. Very powerful and perfectly simple.

Aperocky 3y ago

Plug of basically the same idea except as a pip package: https://github.com/Aperocky/diarycli https://github.com/Aperocky/diarycli `pip install diarycli` Alternatively there is a shell version if you are averse to python/pip package manager as well: https://github.com/Aperocky/diaryman/blob/master/diaryman.sh https://github.com/Aperocky/diaryman/blob/master/diaryman.sh I've been using this for years, it doesn't have any fancy features - it only reliably opens up/create today's diary in vim whenever I type `diary` in command line. with some minor utilities. It is life changing - having `diary` where I can type my thoughts into whenever. I maintain a separate one both for work and life - and both are proving invaluable.

candyman 3y ago
This is an interesting way to do this. I've been using Sublime lately and it's been okay but I need some organization. Does this allow something like "diary [name] [text] where you can add text to any diary with that name and if there is none it creates a new one? I will look at this in more detail next weekend when I am off from work.
- Aperocky 3y ago
  this is basically exactly what it does. It looks through the folder (i.e. year/month/date.md) and try to find whether today's diary exist. If it does exist it just opens it, otherwise it creates it. The script actually accept other terminal editors if you edit a single line in the package. I imagine it will be easy to change to use sublime as well.

robbintt 3y ago

I have been plain text journalling in vim for 18 months. I use a single file. Each day, at the bottom of the file, I put the date, then content. I use this system at work. I do actually use the same concept of putting `TODO` `WIP` or `DONE` at the beginning of each task line, and I am usually using a task list with subheadings on any given day.

Aperocky 3y ago
Let a simple package organize the folder structure and date for you: https://github.com/Aperocky/diarycli https://github.com/Aperocky/diarycli Or shell if you prefer that: https://github.com/Aperocky/diaryman/blob/master/diaryman.sh https://github.com/Aperocky/diaryman/blob/master/diaryman.sh Been using this for 5 years+, and hopefully for decades more.
- robbintt 3y ago
  I will take a look -- however, since I only use a single file, it may not be needed.
koch 3y ago
Sounds like you might be writing markwhen (though it expects a colon after each date or date range) https://github.com/mark-when/markwhen https://github.com/mark-when/markwhen
- robbintt 3y ago
  Adding a layer on top would defeat the simplicity.

tambourine_man 3y ago

>We can now begin writing stuff down: >λ vim journal/2023/1 I think you mean 01

syngrog66 3y ago

This goes a long way for me (in broadstrokes): vi code.go README ./notes ~/notes/topic reqs design TODO script.sh ~/journal/YYYYMMDD interesting.log scratch # etc then git, rsynch, grep (etc) to heart's content main hole is on phone where vi doesnt fit well, but on there either the builtin Notes app or a thirdparty GUI text editor/viewer is fine ("sneaker shared/synched" as needed). though bias to work on laptop where total time efficiency matters

tambourine_man 3y ago

I wanna know what's that tablet on the noisy image. Are you running a terminal or do you export as PNG or HTML? Do you leave it running 24/7? Won't that burn the monitor? Nice project.

ViktorBash 3y ago

I wish I could journal straight into a directory, but I've found that it's crucial to have mobile access to my notes. That's why I mainly now write everything in Google Docs since it's simple and convenient (I tried Notion but was not a fan for various reasons I won't get into it). The only issue with Docs though is there's no Vim support of course, which has annoyed me for a while. I finally got around to building an extension for it though if anyone is interested: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/vim-for-google-docs/aphmodfjbhofkpibocbggkdfnpbpjmpp https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/vim-for-google-doc...

dingnuts 3y ago
Am I the only person who finds the idea of journaling into third party cloud to be an incredibly privacy-invading concept? I always think of a journal as something containing notes that are raw enough that I would be embarrassed if any other person read them. The idea of sending that over a network to be stored in plain text on someone else's server is just horrifying to me. I'd rather open JuiceSSH and log into my machine and open vim. Or I could use Synology Drive to edit a plain text document stored on my NAS. Is that really -that much- less convenient than opening a Google Doc? How inconvenient does the task need to be for me to allow random Googlers or their algorithms to read my innermost thoughts?
- ViktorBash 3y ago
  Yeah, I don't disagree. The notes I'm putting in Google Docs usually err on the side of being blog post ideas or things that I'd want to share with people at some point after I refine it. When it comes down to privacy for sensitive thoughts it's kind of hard to beat local files (and the inconvenience of mobile is just the price to pay).

sequoia 3y ago

I really love this. One nit I must pick, however, is with the "just-so" nature of the journal screenshots. I see something similar in pinterest-style "bullet journal"/habit tracking colourful journal layouts (example[0]). Specifically, these look nice (or work) only if your to-do list is just so, usually fairly short and with really short items on it. So the "demo" versions of these have mocked up content which fits vs. real content, which is frequently less uniform. In this article, you'll see the demo content is a lot of "buy apples" and "make apple pie," but note that no to-do items exceed 18 characters which is the maximum length to fit nicely in that layout. So if you need to "buy turkey baster" (18c) you're OK, but if you need to "return turkey baster" (21c) you've overflowed the layout. Likewise, you can "call Alexander" (15c) but "send thank you card to alexander and elizabeth" (46c) is way over budget, and you'll need to mutilate it down to "ty card alex&beth" (18c) to fit. This leads, in the example, to shortening items to something like "shopping trip," at which point too much context is lost (what if you have a second shopping trip?). Likewise, if you want to dump all the todos you can think of for the week and it's 20 or 30 small items, it's not clear that would work well in these layouts. This is not to malign this system which I think is really cool, but to suggest that it's more useful to see real and more varied content in a system like this to see how it "really looks" rather than exclusively made-to-measure content of 1-6 super-short items per list. 0: https://anjahome.com/summer-bullet-journal-ideas/#What_Is_a_Bullet_Journal https://anjahome.com/summer-bullet-journal-ideas/#What_Is_a_...

jvanderbot 3y ago
I agree. I suspect with some level of curmudgeonness that it's because author calls themself a pixel-artist. I have a brutalist CLI/programmer take on bullet journalling from vim, just for comparison: https://jodavaho.io/posts/bash-journalling.html https://jodavaho.io/posts/bash-journalling.html https://jodavaho.io/posts/bullet-journalling.html https://jodavaho.io/posts/bullet-journalling.html It is essentially: - One hidden folder for journal entries - Each entry is a file of the form YYYY-MM-DD.md - A bash alias will open today's file (or "yesterday" or "next thursday" or "2 weeks") using the date cli util - A few vim formatting steps make the already-well-functioning github markdown work very nicely.
- 3y ago

gsuuon 3y ago

This is incredibly close to what I currently do, except I journal by the day and some of the markers are different (I use `-,.=*[` to give meaning to each item) and items are organized hierarchically via indents. I used to use vimwiki, then neorg, until finally realizing rolling my own simpler solution wouldn't be very hard. The syntax highlights help significantly, and linking is done via just vim's `gf`. I added a couple custom commands to auto open / generate diary entries and it became a super smooth note-taking experience for me.

tianh 3y ago

I have a journal.log (textfile) At the top i have a template command for creating a current timestamp echo $(date '+%Y/%m/%d %H:%M:%S|%a| ') #run with :!!bash directly within vim. I copy this line and run it with :!!bash to init a new entry. 2023/06/19 20:52:02|Mo| Then I write my entries as oneliners 2023/06/19 20:52:02|Mo| Its grep-able like a normal system log file 2023/06/19 20:52:02|Mo| I also use tags, so i can more easily follow 'threads' #corrupt_storage 2023/06/19 20:52:02|Mo| Bad day today #disaster

shahbaby 3y ago

Curious, why go with something like this over obsidian?

bachmeier 3y ago
You might not want everything in markdown format, and you might not want the extras you get with Obsidian. I put a lot of stuff into Obsidian, but sometimes the extra backticks and closing quotes and all that gets annoying. There are times you just want to open a text editor and type away.
- collinvandyck76 3y ago
  Templates are great for this. I have templates for json/go/sh/etc formatting that i can insert using Ctrl+t, and then I'm off to the races. If you add the Templater plugin you can add custom logic such as where to place the cursor when the template is evaluated and inserted. Admittedly, getting to this point with Obsidian is a bit of effort, but being on the other side I think it's worth it. The Git plugin also automatically syncs my vault to a private github repo, so I always have my notes available from anywhere.

jvanderbot 3y ago

I use vim, git, and a very simple set of bash aliases to do bullet journalling in vim. I have since 2013. No frills, no fuss, no formatting limitations... easy to copy / change. https://jodavaho.io/posts/bash-journalling.html https://jodavaho.io/posts/bash-journalling.html https://jodavaho.io/posts/bullet-journalling.html https://jodavaho.io/posts/bullet-journalling.html

ivlad 3y ago

I wonder, why nobody mentioned vimwiki. It has diary functionality (available via <leader>w<leader>w by default) that will create dated files.

botanical 3y ago

I'm surprised there's hardly any mention of org-mode: https://orgmode.org/ https://orgmode.org/ It can be as detailed or simple as you like, with built-in date keeping functionality. This article spends a lot of time getting that part. I use it on Doom Emacs but it's available on vim too

dm319 3y ago

I like this. I use vimwiki for my notes, but I'm struggling to get any sort of todo list working these days. For a while I had some scripts that converted my vimwiki files to html and saved them to Google drive, and it would also find and extract pending todos. As people have mentioned it requires a laptop with linux and vim on it, which is not very compatible with my work (windows machines) or my phone. I wonder if buying something like a GPD pocket will solve this.