I've been noticing lately, at least for myself, that useful technology stopped happening like 10-20 years ago. If all you could use was tech from 2000 and before you would have a pretty stable stack that just worked (without a monthly subscription.)
textfiles, makefiles, perl, php, rss, text based email, news groups, irc, icq, vim/emacs, sed, awk; all better than the crap they have spawned that is supposed to be "better".
Out of curiosity, what technology in the past 5 years do you use that you actually find better than something from 20 years ago?
I like to think of LLMs as the internet's Librarian. They've read nearly all the books in the library, can't always cite the exact page, but can point you in the right direction most of the time.
Completely agree, and for me it is not just about the easier/quicker access to information, but the interactivity. I can ask Claude to spend half an hour to create a learning plan for me, then refine it by explaining what I already know and where I see my main gaps.
And then I can, in the same context, ask questions while reading the articles suggested for learning. - There's also danger involved there, as the constant affirmation ("Great Point!", "You're absolutely right!") breeds overconfidence, but it has led me to learn quite a few things in a more formal capacity that I would have endlessly postponed before.
For example, I work quite a lot with k8s, but during the day, I'm always trying to solve a specific problem. I have never just sat down, and started reading about the architecture, design decisions, and underlying tech in a structured format. Now I have a detailed plan ready on how to fill my foundational gaps over the Christmas break, and this will hopefully save me time during the next big deployment/feature rollout.
Don't get me wrong as I do feel the core of your thesis is correct. Emacs is my editor and I just finished writing a nicely recursive set of gMake for cloud a pipeline. Most of my core software tools haven't changed appreciably since the mid 2000s--right around the time git came out.
edit: I had no idea Nix was so old. I guess it just feels very "new" in my zeitgeist.
> all you could use was tech from 2000 and before you would have a pretty stable stack that just worked
The improvements made during the late 2000s and 2010s mostly had to do with making the functionality of these technologies accessible to non-technical users. I was younger and probably more mentally agile back then, but I remember the first iTouch I ever bought being very intuitive to use; you could usually intimate what you wanted to do without even looking it up. I got so accustomed to this intuitiveness (Windows Vista being an unhappy interruption in those series of memories) that by the time Windows 8 rolled around I was completely taken aback by how bad it was.
I mentioned in another comment that these productivity apps only really see a positive net expected value at the enterprise level, where they aren’t primarily used for efficiency but as coordination mechanisms and institutional memory. Individual users can only really hope to take advantage of them if they are intuitive to use.
From what I’ve observed, most of these UX failures are not the result of a lack of technical aptitude, nor an issue of cost, but of failures in institutional coordination (principal-agent problems and things like that) or the market simply being cornered; both follow the general trend of consolidation in the tech industry. The companies that are making most of our software are huge and they lack the competition to incentivize them to improve.
I'd definitely agree with you on that one. Also notice how the company doesn't push monthly subscriptions on people and just lets their program exist out there.
I don't think it's better than org-mode, but org-mode is also post-2000 so doesn't count here. Obsidian isn't open source, isn't plain text enough, and is slow.
Markdown also falls outside the pre-2000 window as well. But, it's closely based on email and news conventions.
What do you mean by "isn't plain text enough"? I haven't used it, but the only thing I imagine would be indexing with a database, but you can just use plain text tools like grep (or rg) to fill the gaps.
In theory, it's significant better than org-mode, because Electron has much more abilities than Emacs. In reality, it's a matter of taste and personal requirements. Obsidian is customizable, so you make it do whatever you want, and there are many addons available; but org-mode has also a very specific focus on the type of addons being available and builtin stuff it has, were Obsidian is more lacking I would say.
> Obsidian isn't open source, isn't plain text enough, and is slow.
It's very fast for what it offers. And "plain text enough" is again a matter of taste. It's all plaintext, but delivering a useful and very powerful interface on top of it. The kind of area where Emacs is lacking.
I am not aware of what abilities Electron offers that is lacking in Emacs. Can you give a couple of examples?
There's little you can't do with Emacs given it's a small C core running a Lisp interpreter and both the Lisp code that make up Emacs features and the compiled core are open source.
Emacs is a text-interface, character-based, there is no pixel-control. So everything graphical or pixel-related is mostly impossible, until it gets special treatment or involves some hacks to allow some very special limited usage. Electron on the other side has webstack and it's full range of abilities for GUI, mouse-interaction, video, fancy font's, even a freeform canvas and some more...
I backup my Obsidian vault weekly by blindly committing the stuff in `.obsidian` and then reviewing the changes to the `.md` files themselves. It's not version control, per se, but at least a backup and record.
No media other than plain text can come even close to the quantity and quality of tooling we have for it. Plain text is amazing to read, edit, share, version, tts, print and all of it with nearly maximum space efficientcy.
I feel like most things I use existed 5 years ago, but now they are just better versions of what they were 5 years ago. TypeScript, Rust, JetBrains IDEs, Firefox, Slack, iTerm2, Sublime Text, Apple iMessages.
Obsidian is an itertion on text notes. Too many waves of this over the years.
There is indeed a lot of hardware progress, including 3D printing, but also a general shift to laptops, need to sync with phones, much better connectivity, sufficient performance for good video, and high-density screens. Looking at the software I use vs what I used ~2005, most positive changes are due to that.
Yes gaming a lot. I love all the VR games there are and also some custom ports. Lately I've been playing Metro Awakening and I'm really impressed how they got a full AAA-style game completely self-contained on the quest.
Other things I do are watching content, especially VR180. Porn is also a really big added value point, I know some people have moral issues with that but I don't. It is really like you are in the scene.
I also just like to sit and relax in virtual spaces. It's something I've been doing since the pandemic, when we were all locked in our homes for months on end.
I installed some old Debian versions in virtual machines recently, and had a similar thought. Other than security upgrades really 99% of anything useful was already included ~25 years ago. Could probably go back quite a bit further. One annoying thing beyond ~20 years is going back to pre-UTF-8 and having to worry about 8-bit (sometimes 7-bit) character encodings, but that is the only obvious downside. Emacs versions around version 20 also were lacking things that I use today, but nothing that I could not learn to live without.
And you can install everything. As in, you can download (from their archive) the distribution ISOs from old Debian releases. For early version everything fits on a single DVD or single CD-ROM. That is thousands of libraries and applications. You don't have to think about disk space (or RAM) when installing things from there in 2025. Also everything runs very fast.
It's like hardware has finally caught up. The level of bloat from ~2000 is perfect for 2025, especially if you want to be able to set up and run virtual machines without worrying about resource use. For offline use running applications in virtual machines it is perfect.
Sqlite is better now than 20 years ago. Java is better now than Java 20 years ago. Linux init systems are better. Virtualization, containeristion etc are better.
Laptops today are so much nicer than in 2005. I remember 4 hours of battery life being par, and they were heavy, ugly things. They were horribly compromised compared to “real” desktop computers - painfully slow with awful IO options. An Apple Silicon MacBook Pro is something we could only dream of in 2005.
Smartphones featuring a fast computer with internet (internet everywhere!), camera, gyroscope, GPS receiver, video player, music player, payment system, gaming console etc in it, and yes, a video phone.
For reference, Nokia 3310 came out in 2000, and the iPod was not available yet.
WSL2, Neovim, LSPs, Brave Browser, fzf, yt-dlp - just the ones I've used today.
>>makefiles
They are hard to debug and I never could make the compilation as fast as with CMake (which sucks for many other reasons). Hopefully Zig build system will make both obsolete in the near future.
Well the PHP from 20 years ago was much better than the from 25 years ago. But there have been a lot of nice additions since then, including the last 5 years.
I think AI is the obvious one. Also, VSCode (or whatever modern IDE you use) is definitely better than the IDEs that existed 20 years ago. LSP is fantastic. Hm... StackOverflow was definitely a step change over existing tools. Godot is really good, much better than anything that came before, IMO. Modern languages are pretty good these days - Rust and TypeScript are better than languages in the 2000s, to name two of the top of my head.
Quite honestly if you put ai aside and just look at VsCode and typescript which is a common drug of choice these days the Java plus Eclipse of 20 years ago was the superior toolkit. At least semantic search and refactoring worked reliably.
Eclipse was great for java specifically, but a lot of its useful/reliable features came from java being easy to standardize around. Strong static typing and javadocs combined allow for a lot of convenient and reliable features like previews, intellisense, refactoring, etc. For me, vscode feeling worse come from the fact that I'm using it for python and javascript which are inherently harder to design IDE features for, and also vscode is designed to be a good all-round programming editor, not a java-specific editor.
Taking its broader scope into account, I feel like vscode is a significantly better IDE than eclipse, though if I went back to exclusively coding in java and nothing else ever, I might switch back to it.
And so pray tell, what benefits has the industry produced by herding around JS and python in the last two decades? Java was a decent language and getting better and its tooling was stellar, beyond anything those two ecosystems can muster today.
It was 20 wasted years of running in circles. Lots of motion, little progress.
Vite and Bun are about a billion years ahead of their analog in the Java ecosystem in the early 2000s. I do agree that the editor story for Java was very good, though -- way ahead of its time.
I don't know what greatness it brings to the table. I'm sure it's fabulous.
Nonetheless, in the Java of yesteryear we packaged shit into .war files and deployed to app servers. Took all of 30s. Projects (Java backend + JSP frontend) ran just fine right in the ide, no bundling, transpiling, pruning, minifying, or whatever myriad of incantation a js project needs to do to get itself live. it was all live the moment you hit Ctrl-S in the IDE. The class file was created and Tomcat was already running the new code if you set it up integrated to the IDE.
There was zero mental or temporal overhead from source changes to observing results.
Actually I'll go against the grain here in saying this but I do find LLMs quite useful for a number of tasks. However you won't find an argument that the first two decades of the 21st century were mostly a waste of time in terms of what was built and how little the envelope got pushed outside machine learning. As an old backend developer I find the rise and fall of the nosql mania particularly infuriating.
> I've been noticing lately, at least for myself, that useful technology stopped happening like 10-20 years ago. If all you could use was tech from 2000 and before you would have a pretty stable stack that just worked
That's a very romanticized view. 2000s tech is of course not useless, it was a good plateau of quality and diversity of abilities, very foundational if you want to phrase it that way. But we've seen many evolutions and smaller revolutions since then, many improvements which are making everything significant better, easier, faster.
> textfiles, makefiles, perl, php, rss, text based email, news groups, irc, icq, vim/emacs, sed, awk; all better than the crap they have spawned that is supposed to be "better".
That's a very small, focused selection of technologies. Most of them are nearly dead or have evolved several steps since then for a reason.
> Out of curiosity, what technology in the past 5 years do you use that you actually find better than something from 20 years ago?
The liberty of the whole Webstack today is already very awesome. It allows building personalized complex applications on a high level with very little effort. Not to forgotten all the apps which are allowing Add-ons now. Firefox, VS Code or Obsidian today are blowing everything away we had 25 years in terms of ability and customizability for most people, and yes, that includes Emacs even today. I know tech-people often don't understand this, but interfaces and simplicity matters for a lot of cases and people.
But if we are talking about my personal favourites, it would be apps like rofi, fzf and tilling-WMs like AwesomeWM and QTile. The amount of benefit I get from a simple fuzzy-selector and a simple shell- or python-script is insane. I don't think that was available in 2000. Similar topic would be Unicode and icon-fonts. Very small scalled improvements, but very deep benefit for everyone not living in the US-bubble. Language-situation in 2000 was awful.
Sqlite and permanently evolving Postgres are also great benefits. Python3 is very awesome, Rust and Go are really beneficial in terms of speed and security. Comparing all this with the security-nightmares of the 2000s is insane. Though, to be fair, security 25 years ago wasn't as bad as 20 or 15 years ago IIRC, because it was still escalating at the time.
And let's not talk about genre-software...I'm pretty sure even trash like Adobes products have today more useful abilities than they had 25 years ago, it's just the other situation which has become worse. But then again, we have now many more good software like Gimp, Blender, who knows what (I'm not in creative software)...
It also doesn't nag you with administrative tasks to "save" notes when you close Notepad. You close the editor, Notepad is gone. You open Notepad, the notes are there again. And since recently it has tabs too. What a time to be alive.
There's nothing on macOS or Linux that comes close.
Been in a similar philosophy for a while now. I like the idea of staying native to the OS, using open formats as much as possible, and using interoperable toolings.
The idea is to approach content as data-first, with tools on top, and be at ease with plans to Walk-Out when needed.
Besides the article in discussion, here are a few inspirations for plain-text as the defaults.
- The writing of our very own Obsidian’s CEO, Steph Ango at https://stephango.com @kepano on HN.
I used to have a zillion todo txt files in the early 2000's, migrated to OneNote around 2005 and have been using the same OneNote notebook for 20 years now. My life is in there - 20 years worth of todos, lists, thoughts, ideas, etc.. always evolving, perfectly synchronized across computers and mobile. I'm referencing and updating my OneNote all day as I get things done, have ideas, and think of new things to do, or things to remembers. It's an extension of my brain at this point.
I've tried alternatives, but OneNote has been simple and reliable, it just works everywhere. Probably one of the most important apps in my life.
Same but with Keep and GDocs. I still use a local neverending txt like TFA though, as a short-term todo list + clipboard. Short thoughts and little factoids like license plate numbers, appointments, and restaurant recommendations go on Keep (although some of those "short thoughts" have ended up busting the character limit). Refined structured notes end up in a GDoc by topic. Some of my GDocs are now the size of small textbooks. I also love Google Takeout so that I can backup it all up periodically.
I would say, just as you would about OneNote, Keep is one of the most important apps in my life.
One thing I can't do is the never ending todo list, if my main todo list is too long, it's just too stressful for me. I need to break things out into other notes, or just go over it and clean it up into a manageable state. It's kind of like an inbox, you try to get it to zero, you rarely do, but the point is everything in there is on mind and actionable to some extent.
You don't want to lose track of important things in some never ending list. And if they're not important, move them out into a more static list, often it's not even a todo item, but a piece of reference information that's perfect to go into it's own note of related reference information.
I have a primary todo that is heavy read/write of the things I need to do in the next couple weeks. OneNote has a nice drag/drop by line so it's easy to move lines from like Monday to Tuesday, etc.. When ever I think of something I need to do, I add it to the list somewhere, and whenever I'm not doing anything, I open the file and pick something to do, when it's done, I delete it from the list.
Lower down in the todo I have things I need to keep my mind on, but doesn't have like a specific date. Like I have list of things on want to read/watch/listen to/play in the near term, like 5 items each. I have longer lists of each of those as separate notes with like a hundred items each. Near term health stuff I need to monitor. Some back burner tasks, etc.. I try to not let the todo list overall get too big, and will once in a while go over it, and clean it.
The todo is just one note of like a hundred. I have a note of like 'quick references' important addresses, account numbers, identity numbers, vehicle vin/license, insurance numbers, airline mile numbers, etc.. That's a very useful note. So that's like in a Main section, I also have Self, Recreation, Future, Thoughts sections my Personal notebook.
The Self section has like health info/logs/history, car info, house, finances, taxes, even like a list of gifts I've given people for holidays as a good reference for next year (15 years of gifts in a single note). Every time I get sick I add to my health log note: got sick on this date, this is what happened, etc..
Recreation section has notes for movies, tv shows, video games, music, friends, places I'd like to travel to, podcasts, even a Halloween costume list of ideas and costumes I've decided on over the years.
Future is like future plans for work, housing, life, finances, etc.. Thoughts section is like notes for app ideas, thoughts on people, my jobs, random thoughts, like blog post ideas, etc.. I'm always thinking of some random thing and cataloging it away in a particular thought note by subject.
I also have a private section that is password protected with even more personal stuff in it. Each of the programming projects have their own section
There's a Projects notebook with sections for each of my work and personal programming projects, and each of those sections have notes like todo, design, operations, etc..
Search is really nice in OneNote as well, I can just hit ctrl+E and get full text search, quickly jump to a particular note file, or line in a note with matching text. So ctrl+e, enter AA, hit return and it'll open my Quick Ref note right on the line with my AA miles number on it.
You mean it hasn’t been that way for the last 14 years and it hasn’t survived 5 different computer changes and a dozen or so OS migrations and you don’t still have a tiny document with “fun business ideas” to start that company with your fresh out of college gang right next to that “how to organize a great 10 year reunion” sheet from 3 years ago?
I have seen colleagues using an almost append only txt file with notepad.exe. It worked for them I guess, but there were some features I could not live without on Notepad++
For me it often still is.. at least when I'm working alone on something / no collaboration needed. Every time I try something else I revert back to this, although sometimes I do save the files, eventually.
For me it was a ream of printer paper and a mug full of random writing implements.
IMO the platform is unmatched at rapid on-demand WYSIWYG visualization.
Not so great for a productivity app, though. Too easy to lose important information when it's on the same sheet of paper as a drawing of a graph algorithm that turned out to be wrong, and trying to remember whether x cross y positive implies x right or left of y.
I bet you could rig up a webcam, hook it up to a multimodal LLM, that can then instantly scan, sort, and archive all of the separate ideas on each sheet.
That would make it easier to not lose information, but I don't think it makes it any easier of a productivity app.
I do something similar but with Emacs and org mode. I start a new file each time I join a new company and just keep on updating it with things as I'm progressing through my day. The one I carry right now goes back as far as Dec 2017. It's a super useful resource for dailies, or looking back at what you did. Heck I even add TODOs and shell snippets that I often find useful. If you feed it to some LLM then you can even do nice summaries and meaningful searches that aren't necessarily based on single keywords.
I'm using org mode too. For time based tasks I like to get an overview of tasks and timestamped notes by using EasyOrg [0]. You can search based on schedules and deadlines.
Once I realised I rarely read my notes, I now put them in a single note and prepend it when I add something new. It’s weird but I think the value I get from notes is in the writing of them, it’s a way of thinking rather than for recall.
Agreed, I always add to the top of my note files. You can also use timestamps so you know when something was created. Nowadays I use this just like a notebook, adding new pages to the top. You can use it to write not only simple notes, but anything you want, like for example the 1st draft of a book or report you're creating. Even some coding can be done this way.
It really is in the writing and not the referencing 95% of the time. That's why I tend to hand-write my notes. If it 's something I think I should have for reference, I'll transcribe, bookmark a reference, or something.
A lot of my notes and tasks wind up having bits of code and sometimes large data files associated with them, so I've landed on a similar path of using plain text/org mode files, but aided by a little shell function `today` that creates-if-not-exists a new subdirectory named for the date whenever I use it:
function today() {
TODAY_DIR="$HOME/today/"
DATE_DIR=$(date +'%Y-%m-%d')
if [ ! -d $TODAY_DIR$DATE_DIR ];
then
mkdir -p $TODAY_DIR$DATE_DIR
fi;
echo $TODAY_DIR$DATE_DIR
}
So I just do something like `emacs $(today)/tasks.org`. Easy to grep across time, copy things forward (I guess I could do with having `yesterday` and `tomorrow` as well). It's really nice to just use basic CLI tools and little scripts to manage notes and todo lists. Project specific stuff gets a subfolder name every day so it's easy enough to glob ~/today/*/{project}/....
It's a sort of landing zone for all of the miscellaneous artifacts I might deal with on a given day as well:, e.g. `wget -P $(today) https://site.net/cooldata.gzip`.
90% of the time I try to come up with systems more elaborate than a spreadsheet, I realize I’ll spend longer designing and maintaining it than I will actually using it. You really only see those efficiencies across larger organizations and even then it isn’t a given these sorts of systems will be well-maintained, and the benefits they provide are usually not so much efficiency as standardizing the way that users record data. This standardization is in turn mostly useful because it allows larger groups of people to coordinate across time and space (e.g. calendar events, and records of those calendar events for employees who joined years after they occurred).
At an individual level you’re basically always better off using text files as the equivalent of a machine-readable blank piece of paper to scrawl notes on with minimal (if any) thought being given to other features.
This reminds me of a recent reflection, upon seeing an old journal entry of mine from ~2012, where I seemed to be grappling back then with the same exact issues I do today, namely 'browser tab overload'. Even though we've since had over a decade of tech progress (e.g. tab groups and associated features, AI, etc), I'm still drowning in tab overload. It actually made me laugh for a moment. All this powerful AI, large browser feature development teams shipping consistently quarter after quarter, and I'm still in the same spot. I could copy-paste this dilemma across a variety of 'productivity challenges' and arrive at a similar place.
I use a google spreadsheet. Shortcut on my phone home screen so I can add items any time easily.
I log all my lab work and how many hours I've worked in a day and it calculates my hours in a separate tab automatically. Items I need to follow up on are in bold, and get unbolded when I've followed up on them. When I have to write a report, everything is there in chronological order and it is super easy to take the relevant lines and write out the path of my work. When I get into the lab, I open my sheet and bam! I'm right where I left off before I can have the first sip of coffee.
> I use a google spreadsheet. Shortcut on my phone home screen so I can add items any time easily.
And if you aren't already doing this, you can set up a Google Form for mobile that asks for input and then puts the data into the spreadsheet. I do this for exercise tracking and it works great.
txt file is great. Makes me wonder, does the author always have their laptop on them since that's the only place I know of where a txt file can live? Do they go to sleep and wake up next to their laptop?
I've always been an iPhone user and have never seen a .txt file on one and probably you wouldn't be able to edit one on an iPhone if you did have it in Files app - I'm not counting Notes app as a text file here.
I do quarterly notes inside of Notes app but it mostly non-work related stuff and doesn't integrate well with desktop since its kind of a pain to login to iCloud from browser. Quarterly notes bc once the note gets too long, it gets very laggy on phone and is difficult to navigate; i.e. getting to the bottom to write a new line can be tough on mobile.
There are multiple text editors that work just fine on iPhone, certainly on Android as well. Textastic and Runestone are two for iOS (there are more). They read and write text files just fine. You can even keep them version controlled in Github or other Git systems using Working Copy, which allows flexibility in modifying the text file in multiple locations.
https://gitjournal.io/ is something I've started using recently. I edit Markdown notes on my mobile device, and they are then automatically synced to a Git repository.
I use Termux on my Android phone and sync my text-files using git or fossil, just like how I sync between laptops/desktops. I run Emacs in Termux (but vim and many other text editors are also available, for those that prefer those). No need for special apps or cloud stuff, just syncing the plain files and using the same software I use on bigger computers.
Yeah I don't either, I have to use onenote at work and i use obsidian personally. I'd be a lot more productive if I'd be able to use obsidian there though. Onenote is a turd.
Have used this approach for 8 years. Only improvement I can recommend is creating a new txt every quarter (or so) and manually adding everything back to the list to declutter. Works better than any todo app I’ve used (dozens).
I've been using this method for 25 years, but ruthlessly delete completed tasks and things I decided I don't want to do after all. Kind of like inbox 0, but for my _todo.txt
I would probably keep my notes if I had to report to anybody or needed to keep a track of what I was doing, but luckily I haven't needed to do that for a long time.
Same, I have one living document that is constantly being updated with TODOs, questions, notes, but once they are done or irrelevant, I delete them. I am actually surprised how many people here use append-only approaches.
Usually my experience is stuff just slowly drifts into irrelevance. Sometimes people ask me for performance numbers or error messages that are 3 months old and I can find them with a backsearch. On the other hand there's implementation ideas that are years old which are perfectly decent and would probably be improvements, but nobody has ever gotten around to them. Letting them gradually slide upwards out of mind seems appropriate. The only thing I do is archive the old file once a year at new-years to prevent any editor slowdown.
One thing I would like about this system is that I wouldn't get incessant notifications about things I haven't yet done lol. I do think that building a habit to check on a txt file periodically (like the author says) to stay on top of things is better for emotional health than a wall of notifications on the phone lock screen that I've been conditioned to just tap on and select "Remind me tomorrow " without even thinking.
Knowing myself, though, I don't think I'd keep up with this since it would take mental strength on my part to overthink the data structure for the task entry. I've been thinking about how I might also track emotional impact of my todo items on me. I wonder if the open nature of a txt file would be good for instant journaling about things that give me stress?
I really like having some guardrails when it comes to organizing thoughts so this system might not be for me. Also building up the daily habit to organize the todos at the end of each day is something I'd probably struggle with for a while. I do agree that is a great habit to have, still.
You can use your note files for journaling as well. I always add new content on the top with a timestamp, it works just like having a physical notebook where you add new pages, only these new pages go to the top.
I use tasks.org android app (I use my smartphone for everything (except programming or server administration) as I love cellphones and portability)
Tasks.org has cool filter system, which alongside it's widget makes me list of everything that's important to me just on home screen of my smartphone.
For example, I can make a filter "tasks starting today, priority yellow or higher, lists "personal" or "projects", sorr by due date). And make corresponding widget.
Samsung OneUI has widget carousel feature, so I make multiple widgets with different filters and switch by swiping. Very convinent.
Also tasks.org support syncing to nextcloud, but I keep it disabled due to tons of bugs in nextcloud itself.
I make separate list for everything not important at current period of my life, so I can review it later (usually once a week or once a month, my life is very unstable and unpredictable to tell more exactly)
I use this for about a year, so it's not so well tested workflow, but for now it works better than other variants I tried.
I do something similar - I create a "2025December.md" file each month (with proper year/month obviously) and have a bullet list of everything I'm working on/trying to keep track of. I also use it as a scratchpad for whatever, and writing down notes for projects. Each day I insert a "#### 11 Dec 2025" heading at the bottom of the file, then just copy over everything relevant from the previous entry.
It's stored in my Dropbox so it is always backed up, though it is not VCS'd.
It's worked for me for years, far better than any app. Too, I have full control over it, and years of the data, free for processing by any tools/LLMs that I might want (I haven't wanted such a thing so far, but maybe I will).
Earlier, I had a simpler todo system using pen and paper. There was a weekly list which exchanged tasks with daily list. The daily tasks were prioritized in three categories immediately, today, and this week.
Now since I am managing multiple teams, this is not longer scalable. Also majority of work revolves around Slack. People post stuff that I need to follow up at a later stage. I copy these posts and put them into the todo list file.
1. As text files get longer you lose view of things unlike paper. I still feel limited and strong difficulty in fully adopting an online todo system.
2. Many other stuff like Slack threads are difficult to get into todo files. They also lose context. This I would say is a modern problem.
I am convinced that this is how you could run a successful sales team in the ~dozens at a software company before needing a dedicated crm. We prematurely opted for a crm once we had five sales folks and so many calories were burned just managing the systems to ensure the data was just so. "Clean data" was our obsession. Huge waste of time.
If I had to do it all over again, I'd do it how we started: sales meeting every Monday. Open last week's meeting text file. Review the current status of deals. Remove ones that are dead, add ones that are new, update ones that changed. Save file. See you next week.
Everyone talks about txt files and editors etc, but my main driver is actually paper.
Every morning I pickup a sheet of used paper, and on the backside of it I hand-copy unfinished todos from the previous day. I write down every important details from that day on that paper. At the end of the day, it goes into a file folder for future references.
Actually I got this habit while working in the military, where I received a 1-page-long daily status report every morning. I used that to keep track of both organization status and my daily tasks. I did use this log to analyze, design and optimize procedures, one of which involved over 100 tasks.
Searching over this record can be problematic, but most of the time I have auxiliary records like email, message, call history, etc, which can help me with tracking down “when” things happened. It’s not much different from digging into system log.
However, I think, with the rise of LLMs, perhaps it’s about time to migrate to txt finally.
I envy people that stick for a system like this for so long. Because when you master it, it is when you can build a system around it. For this piece, i suggest the author to build his own frontend app, that mimics this system but with a better, clean UI interface. Hell, he can just vibe code it in under a hour these days and at the end leverage the ergonomics of a clean interface, and of course implement integrations that the app will enables, to build systems around it, to become even more productive.
- Compatible with all backup systems and most version control systems
Have you considered that stuff like this is already "more productive" for fluent users than almost any alternative could be?
Somewhere along the line, product people started to mistake following design trends and adding complexity for productivity, forgetting that delivering the right combination of fluency, stability, simiplicity are often the real road to maximizing it.
The portability thing can't be stressed more. It took me ages to liberate my notes from onenote cloud when I moved over to obsidian. Which is of course exactly the point of Microsoft's.
Why would he want to waste a single iota of effort trying to improve something that was working just fine for fourteen years when he wrote this post three years ago? What’s gonna be easier to use than the text editor he knows how to drive without a single thought? What does he gain by taking a simple text file he can sync to any device and replacing it with a database bound to a custom app that he now has to keep running? I mean besides the risk that an OS update will break this app and now he can’t get anything else done until he fixes it, because he’s the only person maintaining it? Most of the interaction is still going to be typing in free-form text, how is taking his hand off the keyboard to poke at a “new task” widget going to make it better and cleaner than just typing return, dash, space? What GUI kit is not going to fall over and whimper when you hand it 51k items to render? What does he gain by spending days trying different ways to get around that interface design problem in hopes of finding one as seamless as his simple text editor?
> besides the risk that an OS update will break this app
Tangential, but what a sad state of affairs is that an OS update can break your app. I'm not a windows user (not voluntarily, at least), but I always appreciated the stability and retrocompatibilità that allowed old apps to run unmodified on modern systems. I heard they dropped the ball on this as well, though.
Why build an app? It seems the whole benefit here is it doesnt need any app. Its completely agnostic and simple. The value is in the data and the way he enters it in.
It sounds like a good system but i still believe it takes the discipline of a strong willed person to do the system no matter what system you use.
If i did this i would give up after 2 days. He says he redoes his list every night ready for the next day —- THAT is the secret here, not the specific system he uses.
I’ve tried all sorts over the years different tools, different systems , different philosophies, inbox zero, gtd etc They don’t work for me. I get by with a notepad and pen and i write lists as and when. Theres people out there and some even have YouTube channeks dedicatd to disseminating their productivity hack and workflows for evey tool
Imaginable, and they are really enthusiastic about it.
I updated it substantially via AI this summer (includes micros, compounds, and various other stats and a webpage with charts now) and then I started making diet changes based on these new features. Is really neat to compare data from before and after those changes. And like you suggested, I keep making improvements to the system and to myself and it becomes really satisfying / motivational.
A super simple solution that works for me is Signal's "Note to self" chat, I just write to myself and it works as a diary/ephemeral todo list. Easily accessible across multiple devices and can be backed up, including recently introduced cloud backups.
If I want some dedication information "pinned" so I don't lose track of it, I just create a dedicated group chat for that topic.
This was my system for a long time and I eventually moved to Notesnook with success, but I bounced off so many notes apps before it. I don't know why, but the feature set had to be just right because one little thing would keep me from sticking with anything else. Plain text files are great and served me well but don't lose hope that some new option could come along and be an improvement.
My daily driver! Considering how much time I spend with these tools, it's surprising that I had relatively few iterations over the years.
I have two major use cases:
1) a TODO list
2) longer texts (project plans, travel plans, shopping lists for things to buy sometimes in the next 6 months (e.g. books to read), etc.).
The TODO list is my daily driver. As the family became larger, it became difficult to track what needs to be done the next day (including simple things, like "give a daily dose of vitamin", "clean & lube the bike chain every 2w"). For a very long time, I used pen & paper. It was OK, used it for years, but it didn't scale so well with kids. An Android TODO/reminder app with notifications and repeats was a life saver. I used BZ Reminder (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bzzzapp) which ticked all the boxes. But the author decided to downgrade the lifetime licences to periodic... It's still not expensive but I don't approve the behavior. After trying out a dozen of similar apps, I ended up with "Reminders: Todo List & Notes" (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pocketbril...). I can't live without a tool like this anymore. TBH, pen & paper TODO lists are still around.
For the longer texts I used an offline wiki (ZIM) for quite some time. Then gradually moved to Google Keep (simple, can accept text & lists, and can be shared). The Keep collection kept growing. With both lists and texts. It's pretty bad input method, but its simplicity kept me using it for years. Now I'm happy with simple txt files (syced between phone & PCs, and properly backed up).
-rw-r--r-- 1 nick nick 691 Mar 16 2001 2001-03.txt
I separated mine by YYYY-MM which is long enough to keep related things together but short enough where it's easy to find things within a single file. It's all super easy to grep things out on demand.
There's no procrastination about organizing or perfect tags. Just brain dump the thought or notes and move on with life.
https://github.com/nickjj/notes was created so I can type things like `notes hello world` and it inserts it for the correct YYYY-MM or `notes` to open the current YYYY-MM in your $EDITOR. It supports piping into it too (good for pasting from your clipboard). It's ~40 lines of shell scripting with comments.
> There's no procrastination about organizing or perfect tags. Just brain dump the thought or notes and move on with life.
I keep my notes on paper and write them in real time, so I agree with this very strongly. I manage to keep up with the real world despite this.
My paper indexing system is two simple things.
1) Write in the next available space. When done writing I draw a dividing horizontal line straight across the whole page. Just above this line I assign it a serial number in a little box.
2) Starting from the back of the last page, I keep metadata for each entry. Usually topic tags, but sometimes it's more involved. I usually do this when I am under less time pressure. It doesn't even have to be the same day. I'm not strict about completeness because if I don't care... well I don't care.
I have circled back to using the apps that are already on my phone, especially the Apple Reminders app which I am currently trying out as my main notes and ideas system.
I have placed it as one of the two bottom widgets on the lock screen which gives me immediate access to everything I need to capture a thought: a main note, the list where I want to store it (e.g., work or personal), the notes field if more context is needed, and I can flag it or schedule a reminder. The app then also has an optional auto-categorize feature which works quite well. Add to that reliable sync across devices and except for a good way to bulk export lists, this has everything I want from a quick draft and capture system.
I use sheets of junk paper (e.g. stuff I got in the mail that is only printed on one side). I keep an "active" one that I cross stuff out from, etc. When I start a new one (about once a week) I go through the old one and port over any remaining items; most of the time I discard the whole thing since it's no longer relevant. If there are important items that are just too big to handle I'll transcribe it to my Calendar, Linear, Reminders app, etc.
To me this is a good balance of:
- Writing things down is the major benefit for me, writing down on physical paper is even more helpful.
- Forces me to garbage collect irrelevant stuff.
- I don't need an app or even to buy paper really.
I have a similar system. I keep my wip.md open in Neovim all the time and the difference is: everyday, I move the done items to a timestamped file. I have records going back to 2009.
It's my timelog and work journal as I expand on items and mark them off as I work on them.
This is the way. Obviously as mentioned, a calendar is a pre-requisite and for me so are various note-taking/writing systems such as a physical notebook, more .txt files, and sometimes heavier stuff like Google Docs. But those are only for deeper work or archival stuff. Most everything starts and and ends right in thst one .txt file. Each day new stuff goes at the top. Sometimes I go through it and delete things that have become meaningless or will never be useful.
The only extra thing is I set up autohotkey macros
For example typing $today or $yesterday will insert the date with a dividing line underneath to separate days into clear blocks
I've tried a lot of different note apps and what I eventually realized is that when it comes to work, I generally don't actually care about old notes 98% of the time.
I only really care about the last week or two and when everything is in one file its optimized for viewing that, like a working memory.
The text file ends up gigantic but its still small data for a computer even after many years of adding to a single file and searching is still fast.
I first read this blog post about a year ago I think. It was a bit after I started developing my own personal productivity app. It got me really excited because my philosophy is extremely similar, and it seems to resonate with people.
I'm still working on the app today but planning to get it out into the world in the new year. I think anyone who enjoys this notepad technique will find it quite familiar but just "powered up" maybe.
Google Keep for me is the way to go. Easy to use on desktop or mobile, can "share" anything with it. I like to make notes with various titles & colors that I use to organize my life/thoughts.
I am incredibly jealous of people for who this works for. Mine just become too unwieldy to manage or work with because they grow out in a crazy fashion.
My "productivity solution" is currently TriliumNotes with three work spaces as 1) Planner with sub notes for year, month, day 2) Brain Dump with subnotes for year and month 3) Projects with sub notes for each project. I manage tasks with Vikunja and then my time with Google Calendar.
It's an absolute mess, but it's the closest I've gotten to a solution that works the way my brain does.
Thank you for sharing. I feel similar to you; jealous this system works for others, sounds like a dream, but too overwhelming for me once it hits some point of no return. Your structure sounds interesting.
I'm genuinely curious how others do not get overwhelmed or sucked into yak-shaving some reorganization of a system like this.
While we're here, let me go ahead and once again give much praise to https://zim-wiki.org , my daily driver for most things in my life.
It was really interesting to see the sort of "second stage" discovery of things like this when obsidian got hot, and I toyed with many of those for a while.
And the end result was me getting even further back into doing what zim does, and even finding new cool little time savers (e.g. interwiki links).
I’ve been using a DOS editor called Carousel. The “carousel” bit is that you can cycle through a number of files in named directories. Every day you start with a new file named by date.
I live in iOS notes. I can access them from phone, home and work computers. I have a work and non-work todo list and notes for about a million other things. Whenever I book a flight or hotel or something, I just paste a screenshot of it in my todo note. No more digging up details from an email or searching through some other system. I even wrote a book using iOS notes as my primary research recording tool.
Agreed. I'm working on a small GUI that just appends to a local .ndjson file. A user just posts with a text box into a feed. Like a one person chat or tweeting into the void. And a local LLM picks apart metadata, storing just enough to index where answers to future questions will be. Then you can use slash commands to get at the analysis like "/tasks last month" or "/summarize work today" etc.
Not sure why you're getting downvoted, but I agree at least in principle. There should be some means to index/search this kind of semi-structured text. Summaries are also nice, but not as useful to me at least.
Like the author I also do tagging, but in the real world some notes will eventually slip through the cracks. Even when it's just one, that's probably the one you're looking for. :)
I used Notational Velocity for years. I loved its free form approach to note taking and searching, but I needed a cross platform solution with files that could be shared using Dropbox.
I now just use three text files open in Sublime Text: todo-today.txt, todo-this-week.txt, and todo-later.txt. I review them daily and promote todos to the next file when appropriate.
Personally, I just use obsidian notes. Its simple enough, uses markdown, syncs to my phone. I like to break projects/problems out into checklists. Helps keep me motivated.
I don't use the 'linking' feature between notes. The whole 'second brain' thing seems like something you do to make a neat screenshot of your note graph. I just use regular old folders like a file directory. My notes have gotten a little messy though.
I have a file like this, several years long, but parsed with YAML so that each day is clearly separated from the next, and for list parsing, and for dictionary parsing so each project I work on is associated with a YAML dictionary key. I can go back in time and easily find notes related to specific projects or specific dates.
I've been doing pretty much the same thing since 2019. The only big change I made was in early 2023, when I started saving a new version of the long txt file each day. It works very well for me but I recognize it isn't the right system for everyone!
I've had a similar system for a while, but the primary pain point is the lack of access on iPhone / iPad. Giant text files are laggy, dropbox integration is poor, etc. A custom app that interacts with the text file might be the best bet :D
What I realized at least for me is that work notes and personal notes are two different use cases
The .txt file approach works for work stuff because I never need to reference it on mobile, if I'm doing software development I need to be on a computer anyway.
Whereas personal stuff I need an actual notetaking app like Notion for the mobile usability
Same here, what ever tools I tried, I keep going back to my txt files. Now I use cursor to edit these txt files and get some amazing auto suggestions given the rich context!
I use Google Calendar as my todo list. Syncs across devices. Notifications. Share with Family & Work. Repeating tasks. Supports notes and attachments. Multiple Lists (calendars). Free.
I read this a few years ago and start to doing that. And I never looked back. I can search what i did on a specific day, search for a task and see all the traces, having it accessible over dropbox.
No upgrade CTA, no nonsense. now even I can feed it to llm and get feedback about my planning, routines and everything
I ended up doing a similar thing when I was a contractor. Just a really long note file that I'd track everything I was doing.
Relatedly, I find all of the todo/task management apps to be utterly overwhelming for my person tasks. I'm so tired of all of the task apps adding way too much complexity.
All I want is:
* Something that's available on all of my devices.
* Can be ordered by sections
* Triage
* Now
* Today
* Tomorrow
* Soon
* Eventually
* Whenever (when-never)
* Let's me add a task without thinking (default to triage)
I've been noticing lately, at least for myself, that useful technology stopped happening like 10-20 years ago. If all you could use was tech from 2000 and before you would have a pretty stable stack that just worked (without a monthly subscription.)
There is also this article today: https://jon.recoil.org/blog/2025/12/an-svg-is-all-you-need.h... about how great good ol' svg is. And then every recurring article about using RSS instead of all the other siloed products.
textfiles, makefiles, perl, php, rss, text based email, news groups, irc, icq, vim/emacs, sed, awk; all better than the crap they have spawned that is supposed to be "better".
Out of curiosity, what technology in the past 5 years do you use that you actually find better than something from 20 years ago?
Not to be the “ai” guy, but LLMs have helped me explore areas of human knowledge that I had postponed otherwise
I am of the age where the internet was pivotal to my education, but the teacher’s still said “don’t trust Wikipedia”
Said another way: I grew up on Google
I think many of us take free access to information for granted
With LLMs, we’ve essentially compressed humanity’s knowledge into a magic mirror
Depending on what you present to the mirror, you get some recombined reflection of the training set out
Is it perfect? No. Does it hallucinate? Yes. It it useful? Extremely.
As a kid that often struggled with questions he didn’t have the words for, Google was my salvation
It allowed me to search with words I did know, to learn about words I didn’t know
These new words both had answer and opened new questions
LLMs are like Google, but you can ask your exact question (and another)
Are they perfect? No.
The benefit of having expertise in some area, means I can see the limits of the technology.
LLMs are not great for novelty, and sometimes struggle with the state of the art (necessarily so).
Their biggest issue is when you walk blindly, LLMs will happily lead the unknowing junior astray.
But so will a blogpost about a new language, a new TS package with a bunch of stars on GitHub, or a new runtime that “simplifies devops”
The biggest tech from the last five years is undoubtedly the magic mirror
Whether it can evolve to Strong AI or not is yet to be seen (and I think unlikely!)
I like to think of LLMs as the internet's Librarian. They've read nearly all the books in the library, can't always cite the exact page, but can point you in the right direction most of the time.
Completely agree, and for me it is not just about the easier/quicker access to information, but the interactivity. I can ask Claude to spend half an hour to create a learning plan for me, then refine it by explaining what I already know and where I see my main gaps.
And then I can, in the same context, ask questions while reading the articles suggested for learning. - There's also danger involved there, as the constant affirmation ("Great Point!", "You're absolutely right!") breeds overconfidence, but it has led me to learn quite a few things in a more formal capacity that I would have endlessly postponed before.
For example, I work quite a lot with k8s, but during the day, I'm always trying to solve a specific problem. I have never just sat down, and started reading about the architecture, design decisions, and underlying tech in a structured format. Now I have a detailed plan ready on how to fill my foundational gaps over the Christmas break, and this will hopefully save me time during the next big deployment/feature rollout.
>Their biggest issue is when you walk blindly, LLMs will happily lead the unknowing junior astray.
The biggest issue is outsourcing agency and skills atrophy
I agree. Show someone from 2000 what Claude code can do and tell them we've developed nothing useful and they'd punch you.
- Uv for Python
- Nix
- Performant Virtualization
- Ghostty
- DuckDB and, in general, performant OLAP
Don't get me wrong as I do feel the core of your thesis is correct. Emacs is my editor and I just finished writing a nicely recursive set of gMake for cloud a pipeline. Most of my core software tools haven't changed appreciably since the mid 2000s--right around the time git came out.
edit: I had no idea Nix was so old. I guess it just feels very "new" in my zeitgeist.
In which ways is ghostty superior to other common terminal emulators?
It's in a stage of the hype cycle where asking that question is pointless.
SSH integration, i18N rendering, windowing, a largely (~70+%) Zig codebase, active community with actual funding
> SSH integration
What does this mean? Googling "ssh integration ghostty" just got me "shell integration" which I'm guessing is not the same thing.
> all you could use was tech from 2000 and before you would have a pretty stable stack that just worked
The improvements made during the late 2000s and 2010s mostly had to do with making the functionality of these technologies accessible to non-technical users. I was younger and probably more mentally agile back then, but I remember the first iTouch I ever bought being very intuitive to use; you could usually intimate what you wanted to do without even looking it up. I got so accustomed to this intuitiveness (Windows Vista being an unhappy interruption in those series of memories) that by the time Windows 8 rolled around I was completely taken aback by how bad it was.
I mentioned in another comment that these productivity apps only really see a positive net expected value at the enterprise level, where they aren’t primarily used for efficiency but as coordination mechanisms and institutional memory. Individual users can only really hope to take advantage of them if they are intuitive to use.
From what I’ve observed, most of these UX failures are not the result of a lack of technical aptitude, nor an issue of cost, but of failures in institutional coordination (principal-agent problems and things like that) or the market simply being cornered; both follow the general trend of consolidation in the tech industry. The companies that are making most of our software are huge and they lack the competition to incentivize them to improve.
What’s an iTouch?
iTouch was a common nickname for the iPod Touch[0]. It was essentially an iPhone without a cellular connection.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod_Touch
Oh I know what an iPod touch is but I never saw that nickname anywhere.
It's what the kids called it growing up in the aughts
I'd say Obsidian (just over five years old, since its first release), which is ironic because it's basically just a UI on top of text files.
I'd definitely agree with you on that one. Also notice how the company doesn't push monthly subscriptions on people and just lets their program exist out there.
I don't think it's better than org-mode, but org-mode is also post-2000 so doesn't count here. Obsidian isn't open source, isn't plain text enough, and is slow.
Markdown also falls outside the pre-2000 window as well. But, it's closely based on email and news conventions.
What do you mean by "isn't plain text enough"? I haven't used it, but the only thing I imagine would be indexing with a database, but you can just use plain text tools like grep (or rg) to fill the gaps.
> I don't think it's better than org-mode
In theory, it's significant better than org-mode, because Electron has much more abilities than Emacs. In reality, it's a matter of taste and personal requirements. Obsidian is customizable, so you make it do whatever you want, and there are many addons available; but org-mode has also a very specific focus on the type of addons being available and builtin stuff it has, were Obsidian is more lacking I would say.
> Obsidian isn't open source, isn't plain text enough, and is slow.
It's very fast for what it offers. And "plain text enough" is again a matter of taste. It's all plaintext, but delivering a useful and very powerful interface on top of it. The kind of area where Emacs is lacking.
I am not aware of what abilities Electron offers that is lacking in Emacs. Can you give a couple of examples?
There's little you can't do with Emacs given it's a small C core running a Lisp interpreter and both the Lisp code that make up Emacs features and the compiled core are open source.
Emacs is a text-interface, character-based, there is no pixel-control. So everything graphical or pixel-related is mostly impossible, until it gets special treatment or involves some hacks to allow some very special limited usage. Electron on the other side has webstack and it's full range of abilities for GUI, mouse-interaction, video, fancy font's, even a freeform canvas and some more...
Logseq for me. Its just so powerful, the infinite nesting and draggable indents and zooming
But it's not, it's a database. That is annoyingøy hard to move around and version control
I backup my Obsidian vault weekly by blindly committing the stuff in `.obsidian` and then reviewing the changes to the `.md` files themselves. It's not version control, per se, but at least a backup and record.
Yep, I have a cron that does git add . && git commit -m “daily commit”. Haven’t touched it in a couple years.
No media other than plain text can come even close to the quantity and quality of tooling we have for it. Plain text is amazing to read, edit, share, version, tts, print and all of it with nearly maximum space efficientcy.
That's pretty far from the truth though.
It is absolutely inferior to a database-like binary format for querying, sorting, searching etc. It's a good tool for certain jobs.
I hear you, but there are true moments of progress.
Vue is a huge improvement over jQuery, is the first one that roughly hit your timeframe.
I feel like most things I use existed 5 years ago, but now they are just better versions of what they were 5 years ago. TypeScript, Rust, JetBrains IDEs, Firefox, Slack, iTerm2, Sublime Text, Apple iMessages.
For me:
- Obsidian notes with self hosted livesync
- VR <3
- 3D Printing
Probably a lot more that i can't think of right now. What I hate it cloud subscription services though
Obsidian is an itertion on text notes. Too many waves of this over the years.
There is indeed a lot of hardware progress, including 3D printing, but also a general shift to laptops, need to sync with phones, much better connectivity, sufficient performance for good video, and high-density screens. Looking at the software I use vs what I used ~2005, most positive changes are due to that.
Oh, and you don't hve to use cloud subscription services.
What do you use VR for? If gaming, what games?
Yes gaming a lot. I love all the VR games there are and also some custom ports. Lately I've been playing Metro Awakening and I'm really impressed how they got a full AAA-style game completely self-contained on the quest.
Other things I do are watching content, especially VR180. Porn is also a really big added value point, I know some people have moral issues with that but I don't. It is really like you are in the scene.
I also just like to sit and relax in virtual spaces. It's something I've been doing since the pandemic, when we were all locked in our homes for months on end.
I installed some old Debian versions in virtual machines recently, and had a similar thought. Other than security upgrades really 99% of anything useful was already included ~25 years ago. Could probably go back quite a bit further. One annoying thing beyond ~20 years is going back to pre-UTF-8 and having to worry about 8-bit (sometimes 7-bit) character encodings, but that is the only obvious downside. Emacs versions around version 20 also were lacking things that I use today, but nothing that I could not learn to live without.
And you can install everything. As in, you can download (from their archive) the distribution ISOs from old Debian releases. For early version everything fits on a single DVD or single CD-ROM. That is thousands of libraries and applications. You don't have to think about disk space (or RAM) when installing things from there in 2025. Also everything runs very fast.
It's like hardware has finally caught up. The level of bloat from ~2000 is perfect for 2025, especially if you want to be able to set up and run virtual machines without worrying about resource use. For offline use running applications in virtual machines it is perfect.
Sqlite is better now than 20 years ago. Java is better now than Java 20 years ago. Linux init systems are better. Virtualization, containeristion etc are better.
Laptops today are so much nicer than in 2005. I remember 4 hours of battery life being par, and they were heavy, ugly things. They were horribly compromised compared to “real” desktop computers - painfully slow with awful IO options. An Apple Silicon MacBook Pro is something we could only dream of in 2005.
Smartphones featuring a fast computer with internet (internet everywhere!), camera, gyroscope, GPS receiver, video player, music player, payment system, gaming console etc in it, and yes, a video phone.
For reference, Nokia 3310 came out in 2000, and the iPod was not available yet.
> what technology in the past 5 years do you use [...]
I don't use any software made in the past 5 years.
I think software has improved in the last 20 years.
My terminal has more colors. My browser got slower.My vi became vim became neovim. The keybindings are almost the same, but they adapt to newer virtual terminals.
As a programmer, my ability to express myself has got more nuanced. Programming languages have got better.
But the software itself doesn't seem to be better. Everything still depends on C, and the older programs live the longest.
> My browser got slower
Is it the browser, or the websites getting more and more resource-intensive as hardware (and also browser optimizations) got better and more powerful?
It’s both.
WSL2, Neovim, LSPs, Brave Browser, fzf, yt-dlp - just the ones I've used today.
>>makefiles
They are hard to debug and I never could make the compilation as fast as with CMake (which sucks for many other reasons). Hopefully Zig build system will make both obsolete in the near future.
Well the PHP from 20 years ago was much better than the from 25 years ago. But there have been a lot of nice additions since then, including the last 5 years.
it is called activation energy, sometimes a new technology needs to be created to get the ball rolling
Surely there are some!
I think AI is the obvious one. Also, VSCode (or whatever modern IDE you use) is definitely better than the IDEs that existed 20 years ago. LSP is fantastic. Hm... StackOverflow was definitely a step change over existing tools. Godot is really good, much better than anything that came before, IMO. Modern languages are pretty good these days - Rust and TypeScript are better than languages in the 2000s, to name two of the top of my head.
Quite honestly if you put ai aside and just look at VsCode and typescript which is a common drug of choice these days the Java plus Eclipse of 20 years ago was the superior toolkit. At least semantic search and refactoring worked reliably.
Eclipse was great for java specifically, but a lot of its useful/reliable features came from java being easy to standardize around. Strong static typing and javadocs combined allow for a lot of convenient and reliable features like previews, intellisense, refactoring, etc. For me, vscode feeling worse come from the fact that I'm using it for python and javascript which are inherently harder to design IDE features for, and also vscode is designed to be a good all-round programming editor, not a java-specific editor.
Taking its broader scope into account, I feel like vscode is a significantly better IDE than eclipse, though if I went back to exclusively coding in java and nothing else ever, I might switch back to it.
And so pray tell, what benefits has the industry produced by herding around JS and python in the last two decades? Java was a decent language and getting better and its tooling was stellar, beyond anything those two ecosystems can muster today.
It was 20 wasted years of running in circles. Lots of motion, little progress.
Vite and Bun are about a billion years ahead of their analog in the Java ecosystem in the early 2000s. I do agree that the editor story for Java was very good, though -- way ahead of its time.
I don't know what greatness it brings to the table. I'm sure it's fabulous.
Nonetheless, in the Java of yesteryear we packaged shit into .war files and deployed to app servers. Took all of 30s. Projects (Java backend + JSP frontend) ran just fine right in the ide, no bundling, transpiling, pruning, minifying, or whatever myriad of incantation a js project needs to do to get itself live. it was all live the moment you hit Ctrl-S in the IDE. The class file was created and Tomcat was already running the new code if you set it up integrated to the IDE.
There was zero mental or temporal overhead from source changes to observing results.
Actually I'll go against the grain here in saying this but I do find LLMs quite useful for a number of tasks. However you won't find an argument that the first two decades of the 21st century were mostly a waste of time in terms of what was built and how little the envelope got pushed outside machine learning. As an old backend developer I find the rise and fall of the nosql mania particularly infuriating.
> I've been noticing lately, at least for myself, that useful technology stopped happening like 10-20 years ago. If all you could use was tech from 2000 and before you would have a pretty stable stack that just worked
That's a very romanticized view. 2000s tech is of course not useless, it was a good plateau of quality and diversity of abilities, very foundational if you want to phrase it that way. But we've seen many evolutions and smaller revolutions since then, many improvements which are making everything significant better, easier, faster.
> textfiles, makefiles, perl, php, rss, text based email, news groups, irc, icq, vim/emacs, sed, awk; all better than the crap they have spawned that is supposed to be "better".
That's a very small, focused selection of technologies. Most of them are nearly dead or have evolved several steps since then for a reason.
> Out of curiosity, what technology in the past 5 years do you use that you actually find better than something from 20 years ago?
The liberty of the whole Webstack today is already very awesome. It allows building personalized complex applications on a high level with very little effort. Not to forgotten all the apps which are allowing Add-ons now. Firefox, VS Code or Obsidian today are blowing everything away we had 25 years in terms of ability and customizability for most people, and yes, that includes Emacs even today. I know tech-people often don't understand this, but interfaces and simplicity matters for a lot of cases and people.
But if we are talking about my personal favourites, it would be apps like rofi, fzf and tilling-WMs like AwesomeWM and QTile. The amount of benefit I get from a simple fuzzy-selector and a simple shell- or python-script is insane. I don't think that was available in 2000. Similar topic would be Unicode and icon-fonts. Very small scalled improvements, but very deep benefit for everyone not living in the US-bubble. Language-situation in 2000 was awful.
Sqlite and permanently evolving Postgres are also great benefits. Python3 is very awesome, Rust and Go are really beneficial in terms of speed and security. Comparing all this with the security-nightmares of the 2000s is insane. Though, to be fair, security 25 years ago wasn't as bad as 20 or 15 years ago IIRC, because it was still escalating at the time.
And let's not talk about genre-software...I'm pretty sure even trash like Adobes products have today more useful abilities than they had 25 years ago, it's just the other situation which has become worse. But then again, we have now many more good software like Gimp, Blender, who knows what (I'm not in creative software)...
With notepad.exe:
At the first line of the a .txt file put .LOG This will then put a timestamp at the end of the file every time you open it.
Also, if you press the F5 key it inserts a timestamp.
Been using this for years and it's pretty much all I ever needed.
These are incredible! Learn something new every day, thank you for sharing.
Documented here: https://www.pctips.com/notepad-tips-and-tricks/
Windows Notepad is seriously underrated.
It also doesn't nag you with administrative tasks to "save" notes when you close Notepad. You close the editor, Notepad is gone. You open Notepad, the notes are there again. And since recently it has tabs too. What a time to be alive.
There's nothing on macOS or Linux that comes close.
That's cool. I just tested it out and noticed notepad.exe has become a markdown editor/viewer too.
Not sure if that's a good or bad thing.
Huh, TIL.
Thank you throwaway613745!
The real clippy was in the comments all along
Neat! Thanks for sharing
Been in a similar philosophy for a while now. I like the idea of staying native to the OS, using open formats as much as possible, and using interoperable toolings.
The idea is to approach content as data-first, with tools on top, and be at ease with plans to Walk-Out when needed.
Besides the article in discussion, here are a few inspirations for plain-text as the defaults.
- The writing of our very own Obsidian’s CEO, Steph Ango at https://stephango.com @kepano on HN.
- A Plain Text Personal Organizer, https://danlucraft.com/blog/2008/04/plain-text-organizer/
- A template to organise life in plain text, https://github.com/jukil/plain-text-life
- Achieve a text-only work-flow, http://donlelek.github.io/2015-03-09-text-only-workflow/
- Note Taking, Writing and Life Organization Using Plain Text Files, http://www.markwk.com/plain-text-life.html
- Plain Text Journaling System, https://georgecoghill.wordpress.com/plain-text/
- Plain Text Project, https://plaintextproject.online/
- PlainText Productivity, http://plaintext-productivity.net/
- The Plain Text Life: Note Taking, Writing and Life Organization Using Plain Text Files, http://www.markwk.com/plain-text-life.html
- Use plain text email, https://useplaintext.email/
- Writing Plain Text by Derek Sivers, https://sive.rs/plaintext
Your "A Plain Text Personal Organizer" leads to some ad.
That is sad. He seem to have stopped writing after 2011. He might have lost the website.
Here is one of the latest archived version https://web.archive.org/web/20120205111929/https://danlucraf...
I used to have a zillion todo txt files in the early 2000's, migrated to OneNote around 2005 and have been using the same OneNote notebook for 20 years now. My life is in there - 20 years worth of todos, lists, thoughts, ideas, etc.. always evolving, perfectly synchronized across computers and mobile. I'm referencing and updating my OneNote all day as I get things done, have ideas, and think of new things to do, or things to remembers. It's an extension of my brain at this point.
I've tried alternatives, but OneNote has been simple and reliable, it just works everywhere. Probably one of the most important apps in my life.
Same but with Keep and GDocs. I still use a local neverending txt like TFA though, as a short-term todo list + clipboard. Short thoughts and little factoids like license plate numbers, appointments, and restaurant recommendations go on Keep (although some of those "short thoughts" have ended up busting the character limit). Refined structured notes end up in a GDoc by topic. Some of my GDocs are now the size of small textbooks. I also love Google Takeout so that I can backup it all up periodically.
I would say, just as you would about OneNote, Keep is one of the most important apps in my life.
One thing I can't do is the never ending todo list, if my main todo list is too long, it's just too stressful for me. I need to break things out into other notes, or just go over it and clean it up into a manageable state. It's kind of like an inbox, you try to get it to zero, you rarely do, but the point is everything in there is on mind and actionable to some extent.
You don't want to lose track of important things in some never ending list. And if they're not important, move them out into a more static list, often it's not even a todo item, but a piece of reference information that's perfect to go into it's own note of related reference information.
Could you please say more about your day-to-day with OneNote? How is your notebook organized, how do you add to it, how do you review it, etc.?
I have a primary todo that is heavy read/write of the things I need to do in the next couple weeks. OneNote has a nice drag/drop by line so it's easy to move lines from like Monday to Tuesday, etc.. When ever I think of something I need to do, I add it to the list somewhere, and whenever I'm not doing anything, I open the file and pick something to do, when it's done, I delete it from the list.
Lower down in the todo I have things I need to keep my mind on, but doesn't have like a specific date. Like I have list of things on want to read/watch/listen to/play in the near term, like 5 items each. I have longer lists of each of those as separate notes with like a hundred items each. Near term health stuff I need to monitor. Some back burner tasks, etc.. I try to not let the todo list overall get too big, and will once in a while go over it, and clean it.
The todo is just one note of like a hundred. I have a note of like 'quick references' important addresses, account numbers, identity numbers, vehicle vin/license, insurance numbers, airline mile numbers, etc.. That's a very useful note. So that's like in a Main section, I also have Self, Recreation, Future, Thoughts sections my Personal notebook.
The Self section has like health info/logs/history, car info, house, finances, taxes, even like a list of gifts I've given people for holidays as a good reference for next year (15 years of gifts in a single note). Every time I get sick I add to my health log note: got sick on this date, this is what happened, etc..
Recreation section has notes for movies, tv shows, video games, music, friends, places I'd like to travel to, podcasts, even a Halloween costume list of ideas and costumes I've decided on over the years.
Future is like future plans for work, housing, life, finances, etc.. Thoughts section is like notes for app ideas, thoughts on people, my jobs, random thoughts, like blog post ideas, etc.. I'm always thinking of some random thing and cataloging it away in a particular thought note by subject.
I also have a private section that is password protected with even more personal stuff in it. Each of the programming projects have their own section
There's a Projects notebook with sections for each of my work and personal programming projects, and each of those sections have notes like todo, design, operations, etc..
Search is really nice in OneNote as well, I can just hit ctrl+E and get full text search, quickly jump to a particular note file, or line in a note with matching text. So ctrl+e, enter AA, hit return and it'll open my Quick Ref note right on the line with my AA miles number on it.
Gonna be honest, my productivity app once upon a time was unsaved sublime text documents
You mean it hasn’t been that way for the last 14 years and it hasn’t survived 5 different computer changes and a dozen or so OS migrations and you don’t still have a tiny document with “fun business ideas” to start that company with your fresh out of college gang right next to that “how to organize a great 10 year reunion” sheet from 3 years ago?
Must be a me thing, then.
My productivity app at work was Notepad++
I have seen colleagues using an almost append only txt file with notepad.exe. It worked for them I guess, but there were some features I could not live without on Notepad++
Mine is the same, but unsaved files in Notepad++
TextMate here. Unsaved ofc.
For me it often still is.. at least when I'm working alone on something / no collaboration needed. Every time I try something else I revert back to this, although sometimes I do save the files, eventually.
This is still my way of doing things!!
What have you moved on to?
Scratch files in jetbrains ides also!
My productivity app is a sketchbook and a pencil, if anyone knows what those are.
For me it was a ream of printer paper and a mug full of random writing implements.
IMO the platform is unmatched at rapid on-demand WYSIWYG visualization.
Not so great for a productivity app, though. Too easy to lose important information when it's on the same sheet of paper as a drawing of a graph algorithm that turned out to be wrong, and trying to remember whether x cross y positive implies x right or left of y.
I bet you could rig up a webcam, hook it up to a multimodal LLM, that can then instantly scan, sort, and archive all of the separate ideas on each sheet.
That would make it easier to not lose information, but I don't think it makes it any easier of a productivity app.
I do something similar but with Emacs and org mode. I start a new file each time I join a new company and just keep on updating it with things as I'm progressing through my day. The one I carry right now goes back as far as Dec 2017. It's a super useful resource for dailies, or looking back at what you did. Heck I even add TODOs and shell snippets that I often find useful. If you feed it to some LLM then you can even do nice summaries and meaningful searches that aren't necessarily based on single keywords.
Yep. Org-gtd, Org-Roam and Org-journal user here. Haven't needed anything else. All local, searchable with deft and old fashioned grep.
I'm using org mode too. For time based tasks I like to get an overview of tasks and timestamped notes by using EasyOrg [0]. You can search based on schedules and deadlines.
[0] https://easyorgmode.com/docs/org-agenda
Once I realised I rarely read my notes, I now put them in a single note and prepend it when I add something new. It’s weird but I think the value I get from notes is in the writing of them, it’s a way of thinking rather than for recall.
Agreed, I always add to the top of my note files. You can also use timestamps so you know when something was created. Nowadays I use this just like a notebook, adding new pages to the top. You can use it to write not only simple notes, but anything you want, like for example the 1st draft of a book or report you're creating. Even some coding can be done this way.
It really is in the writing and not the referencing 95% of the time. That's why I tend to hand-write my notes. If it 's something I think I should have for reference, I'll transcribe, bookmark a reference, or something.
A lot of my notes and tasks wind up having bits of code and sometimes large data files associated with them, so I've landed on a similar path of using plain text/org mode files, but aided by a little shell function `today` that creates-if-not-exists a new subdirectory named for the date whenever I use it:
So I just do something like `emacs $(today)/tasks.org`. Easy to grep across time, copy things forward (I guess I could do with having `yesterday` and `tomorrow` as well). It's really nice to just use basic CLI tools and little scripts to manage notes and todo lists. Project specific stuff gets a subfolder name every day so it's easy enough to glob ~/today/*/{project}/....It's a sort of landing zone for all of the miscellaneous artifacts I might deal with on a given day as well:, e.g. `wget -P $(today) https://site.net/cooldata.gzip`.
90% of the time I try to come up with systems more elaborate than a spreadsheet, I realize I’ll spend longer designing and maintaining it than I will actually using it. You really only see those efficiencies across larger organizations and even then it isn’t a given these sorts of systems will be well-maintained, and the benefits they provide are usually not so much efficiency as standardizing the way that users record data. This standardization is in turn mostly useful because it allows larger groups of people to coordinate across time and space (e.g. calendar events, and records of those calendar events for employees who joined years after they occurred).
At an individual level you’re basically always better off using text files as the equivalent of a machine-readable blank piece of paper to scrawl notes on with minimal (if any) thought being given to other features.
This reminds me of a recent reflection, upon seeing an old journal entry of mine from ~2012, where I seemed to be grappling back then with the same exact issues I do today, namely 'browser tab overload'. Even though we've since had over a decade of tech progress (e.g. tab groups and associated features, AI, etc), I'm still drowning in tab overload. It actually made me laugh for a moment. All this powerful AI, large browser feature development teams shipping consistently quarter after quarter, and I'm still in the same spot. I could copy-paste this dilemma across a variety of 'productivity challenges' and arrive at a similar place.
I use a google spreadsheet. Shortcut on my phone home screen so I can add items any time easily.
I log all my lab work and how many hours I've worked in a day and it calculates my hours in a separate tab automatically. Items I need to follow up on are in bold, and get unbolded when I've followed up on them. When I have to write a report, everything is there in chronological order and it is super easy to take the relevant lines and write out the path of my work. When I get into the lab, I open my sheet and bam! I'm right where I left off before I can have the first sip of coffee.
This has been a complete game changer for me.
I've never been so organized in my life.
> I use a google spreadsheet. Shortcut on my phone home screen so I can add items any time easily.
And if you aren't already doing this, you can set up a Google Form for mobile that asks for input and then puts the data into the spreadsheet. I do this for exercise tracking and it works great.
txt file is great. Makes me wonder, does the author always have their laptop on them since that's the only place I know of where a txt file can live? Do they go to sleep and wake up next to their laptop?
I've always been an iPhone user and have never seen a .txt file on one and probably you wouldn't be able to edit one on an iPhone if you did have it in Files app - I'm not counting Notes app as a text file here.
I do quarterly notes inside of Notes app but it mostly non-work related stuff and doesn't integrate well with desktop since its kind of a pain to login to iCloud from browser. Quarterly notes bc once the note gets too long, it gets very laggy on phone and is difficult to navigate; i.e. getting to the bottom to write a new line can be tough on mobile.
There are multiple text editors that work just fine on iPhone, certainly on Android as well. Textastic and Runestone are two for iOS (there are more). They read and write text files just fine. You can even keep them version controlled in Github or other Git systems using Working Copy, which allows flexibility in modifying the text file in multiple locations.
https://gitjournal.io/ is something I've started using recently. I edit Markdown notes on my mobile device, and they are then automatically synced to a Git repository.
I use Termux on my Android phone and sync my text-files using git or fossil, just like how I sync between laptops/desktops. I run Emacs in Termux (but vim and many other text editors are also available, for those that prefer those). No need for special apps or cloud stuff, just syncing the plain files and using the same software I use on bigger computers.
I don't take notes on my phone. Sometimes I send a message to myself on Telegram so I can continue with the thought on my laptop.
I do the same as the author and sync the file with nextcloud. Rarely open it on my phone but if I must, I can.
You don't have to use the same solution for work and personal notes
Yeah I don't either, I have to use onenote at work and i use obsidian personally. I'd be a lot more productive if I'd be able to use obsidian there though. Onenote is a turd.
"I use Remote Desktop so everything is accessible from every device"
Have used this approach for 8 years. Only improvement I can recommend is creating a new txt every quarter (or so) and manually adding everything back to the list to declutter. Works better than any todo app I’ve used (dozens).
I've been using this method for 25 years, but ruthlessly delete completed tasks and things I decided I don't want to do after all. Kind of like inbox 0, but for my _todo.txt
I would probably keep my notes if I had to report to anybody or needed to keep a track of what I was doing, but luckily I haven't needed to do that for a long time.
Same, I have one living document that is constantly being updated with TODOs, questions, notes, but once they are done or irrelevant, I delete them. I am actually surprised how many people here use append-only approaches.
Usually my experience is stuff just slowly drifts into irrelevance. Sometimes people ask me for performance numbers or error messages that are 3 months old and I can find them with a backsearch. On the other hand there's implementation ideas that are years old which are perfectly decent and would probably be improvements, but nobody has ever gotten around to them. Letting them gradually slide upwards out of mind seems appropriate. The only thing I do is archive the old file once a year at new-years to prevent any editor slowdown.
One thing I would like about this system is that I wouldn't get incessant notifications about things I haven't yet done lol. I do think that building a habit to check on a txt file periodically (like the author says) to stay on top of things is better for emotional health than a wall of notifications on the phone lock screen that I've been conditioned to just tap on and select "Remind me tomorrow " without even thinking.
Knowing myself, though, I don't think I'd keep up with this since it would take mental strength on my part to overthink the data structure for the task entry. I've been thinking about how I might also track emotional impact of my todo items on me. I wonder if the open nature of a txt file would be good for instant journaling about things that give me stress?
I really like having some guardrails when it comes to organizing thoughts so this system might not be for me. Also building up the daily habit to organize the todos at the end of each day is something I'd probably struggle with for a while. I do agree that is a great habit to have, still.
You can use your note files for journaling as well. I always add new content on the top with a timestamp, it works just like having a physical notebook where you add new pages, only these new pages go to the top.
Maybe printing the first (last?) line of a file whenever a terminal is opened would work
I use tasks.org android app (I use my smartphone for everything (except programming or server administration) as I love cellphones and portability)
Tasks.org has cool filter system, which alongside it's widget makes me list of everything that's important to me just on home screen of my smartphone. For example, I can make a filter "tasks starting today, priority yellow or higher, lists "personal" or "projects", sorr by due date). And make corresponding widget.
Samsung OneUI has widget carousel feature, so I make multiple widgets with different filters and switch by swiping. Very convinent.
Also tasks.org support syncing to nextcloud, but I keep it disabled due to tons of bugs in nextcloud itself.
I make separate list for everything not important at current period of my life, so I can review it later (usually once a week or once a month, my life is very unstable and unpredictable to tell more exactly)
I use this for about a year, so it's not so well tested workflow, but for now it works better than other variants I tried.
I do something similar - I create a "2025December.md" file each month (with proper year/month obviously) and have a bullet list of everything I'm working on/trying to keep track of. I also use it as a scratchpad for whatever, and writing down notes for projects. Each day I insert a "#### 11 Dec 2025" heading at the bottom of the file, then just copy over everything relevant from the previous entry.
It's stored in my Dropbox so it is always backed up, though it is not VCS'd. It's worked for me for years, far better than any app. Too, I have full control over it, and years of the data, free for processing by any tools/LLMs that I might want (I haven't wanted such a thing so far, but maybe I will).
Consider naming them like YYYY-MM and they’ll be sorted alphabetically and chronologically at the same time.
2025-12.md, 2026-01.md, etc
Source: spent too much of my life creating monthly financial reports.
Earlier, I had a simpler todo system using pen and paper. There was a weekly list which exchanged tasks with daily list. The daily tasks were prioritized in three categories immediately, today, and this week.
Now since I am managing multiple teams, this is not longer scalable. Also majority of work revolves around Slack. People post stuff that I need to follow up at a later stage. I copy these posts and put them into the todo list file.
1. As text files get longer you lose view of things unlike paper. I still feel limited and strong difficulty in fully adopting an online todo system.
2. Many other stuff like Slack threads are difficult to get into todo files. They also lose context. This I would say is a modern problem.
What do you guys think?
I am convinced that this is how you could run a successful sales team in the ~dozens at a software company before needing a dedicated crm. We prematurely opted for a crm once we had five sales folks and so many calories were burned just managing the systems to ensure the data was just so. "Clean data" was our obsession. Huge waste of time.
If I had to do it all over again, I'd do it how we started: sales meeting every Monday. Open last week's meeting text file. Review the current status of deals. Remove ones that are dead, add ones that are new, update ones that changed. Save file. See you next week.
I use never-ending notion pages like this and now they have grown so large that they crash on mobile / tablet so I can only access via desktop.
If anyone knows of a good rich markdown / block based editor that can handle huge pages let me know!
Sometimes a simple bash script will give it wings: https://github.com/Aperocky/diaryman
What this is:
$ diary # opens vim to $DIARYDIR/year/month/day.md
Everyone talks about txt files and editors etc, but my main driver is actually paper.
Every morning I pickup a sheet of used paper, and on the backside of it I hand-copy unfinished todos from the previous day. I write down every important details from that day on that paper. At the end of the day, it goes into a file folder for future references.
Actually I got this habit while working in the military, where I received a 1-page-long daily status report every morning. I used that to keep track of both organization status and my daily tasks. I did use this log to analyze, design and optimize procedures, one of which involved over 100 tasks.
Searching over this record can be problematic, but most of the time I have auxiliary records like email, message, call history, etc, which can help me with tracking down “when” things happened. It’s not much different from digging into system log.
However, I think, with the rise of LLMs, perhaps it’s about time to migrate to txt finally.
I envy people that stick for a system like this for so long. Because when you master it, it is when you can build a system around it. For this piece, i suggest the author to build his own frontend app, that mimics this system but with a better, clean UI interface. Hell, he can just vibe code it in under a hour these days and at the end leverage the ergonomics of a clean interface, and of course implement integrations that the app will enables, to build systems around it, to become even more productive.
- Essentially zero input or transactional latency
- Proven effective after 14 years of heavy use
- Celebrated by user
- Zero dependencies
- Maximally portable
- Outage-proof
- Compatible with all backup systems and most version control systems
Have you considered that stuff like this is already "more productive" for fluent users than almost any alternative could be?
Somewhere along the line, product people started to mistake following design trends and adding complexity for productivity, forgetting that delivering the right combination of fluency, stability, simiplicity are often the real road to maximizing it.
The portability thing can't be stressed more. It took me ages to liberate my notes from onenote cloud when I moved over to obsidian. Which is of course exactly the point of Microsoft's.
> Celebrated by user
Oh I’m totally putting this in a performance review this year.
Why?
Why would he want to waste a single iota of effort trying to improve something that was working just fine for fourteen years when he wrote this post three years ago? What’s gonna be easier to use than the text editor he knows how to drive without a single thought? What does he gain by taking a simple text file he can sync to any device and replacing it with a database bound to a custom app that he now has to keep running? I mean besides the risk that an OS update will break this app and now he can’t get anything else done until he fixes it, because he’s the only person maintaining it? Most of the interaction is still going to be typing in free-form text, how is taking his hand off the keyboard to poke at a “new task” widget going to make it better and cleaner than just typing return, dash, space? What GUI kit is not going to fall over and whimper when you hand it 51k items to render? What does he gain by spending days trying different ways to get around that interface design problem in hopes of finding one as seamless as his simple text editor?
> besides the risk that an OS update will break this app
Tangential, but what a sad state of affairs is that an OS update can break your app. I'm not a windows user (not voluntarily, at least), but I always appreciated the stability and retrocompatibilità that allowed old apps to run unmodified on modern systems. I heard they dropped the ball on this as well, though.
Why build an app? It seems the whole benefit here is it doesnt need any app. Its completely agnostic and simple. The value is in the data and the way he enters it in.
It sounds like a good system but i still believe it takes the discipline of a strong willed person to do the system no matter what system you use.
If i did this i would give up after 2 days. He says he redoes his list every night ready for the next day —- THAT is the secret here, not the specific system he uses.
I’ve tried all sorts over the years different tools, different systems , different philosophies, inbox zero, gtd etc They don’t work for me. I get by with a notepad and pen and i write lists as and when. Theres people out there and some even have YouTube channeks dedicatd to disseminating their productivity hack and workflows for evey tool Imaginable, and they are really enthusiastic about it.
It doesn’t do it for me im too free spirited.
I started tracking everything I ate three years ago and even posted about it via this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32552288
I updated it substantially via AI this summer (includes micros, compounds, and various other stats and a webpage with charts now) and then I started making diet changes based on these new features. Is really neat to compare data from before and after those changes. And like you suggested, I keep making improvements to the system and to myself and it becomes really satisfying / motivational.
Is still driven by simple text files.
Satire?
I wish I could tell honest comments from satire apart. It's especially hard after reading the future HN created by Gemini that was posted yesterday.
Why would he?
A super simple solution that works for me is Signal's "Note to self" chat, I just write to myself and it works as a diary/ephemeral todo list. Easily accessible across multiple devices and can be backed up, including recently introduced cloud backups.
If I want some dedication information "pinned" so I don't lose track of it, I just create a dedicated group chat for that topic.
This was my system for a long time and I eventually moved to Notesnook with success, but I bounced off so many notes apps before it. I don't know why, but the feature set had to be just right because one little thing would keep me from sticking with anything else. Plain text files are great and served me well but don't lose hope that some new option could come along and be an improvement.
My daily driver! Considering how much time I spend with these tools, it's surprising that I had relatively few iterations over the years.
I have two major use cases:
1) a TODO list
2) longer texts (project plans, travel plans, shopping lists for things to buy sometimes in the next 6 months (e.g. books to read), etc.).
The TODO list is my daily driver. As the family became larger, it became difficult to track what needs to be done the next day (including simple things, like "give a daily dose of vitamin", "clean & lube the bike chain every 2w"). For a very long time, I used pen & paper. It was OK, used it for years, but it didn't scale so well with kids. An Android TODO/reminder app with notifications and repeats was a life saver. I used BZ Reminder (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bzzzapp) which ticked all the boxes. But the author decided to downgrade the lifetime licences to periodic... It's still not expensive but I don't approve the behavior. After trying out a dozen of similar apps, I ended up with "Reminders: Todo List & Notes" (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pocketbril...). I can't live without a tool like this anymore. TBH, pen & paper TODO lists are still around.
For the longer texts I used an offline wiki (ZIM) for quite some time. Then gradually moved to Google Keep (simple, can accept text & lists, and can be shared). The Keep collection kept growing. With both lists and texts. It's pretty bad input method, but its simplicity kept me using it for years. Now I'm happy with simple txt files (syced between phone & PCs, and properly backed up).
Previously, (I ain't complaining, I like fresh conversations on this one.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39432876
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29661167
Thanks! Macroexpanded:
My productivity app is a never-ending .txt file (2020) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39432876 - Feb 2024 (264 comments)
My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file (2020) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29661167 - Dec 2021 (202 comments)
My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22276184 - Feb 2020 (402 comments)
I did something similar since 2001:
I separated mine by YYYY-MM which is long enough to keep related things together but short enough where it's easy to find things within a single file. It's all super easy to grep things out on demand.There's no procrastination about organizing or perfect tags. Just brain dump the thought or notes and move on with life.
https://github.com/nickjj/notes was created so I can type things like `notes hello world` and it inserts it for the correct YYYY-MM or `notes` to open the current YYYY-MM in your $EDITOR. It supports piping into it too (good for pasting from your clipboard). It's ~40 lines of shell scripting with comments.
> There's no procrastination about organizing or perfect tags. Just brain dump the thought or notes and move on with life.
I keep my notes on paper and write them in real time, so I agree with this very strongly. I manage to keep up with the real world despite this.
My paper indexing system is two simple things.
1) Write in the next available space. When done writing I draw a dividing horizontal line straight across the whole page. Just above this line I assign it a serial number in a little box.
2) Starting from the back of the last page, I keep metadata for each entry. Usually topic tags, but sometimes it's more involved. I usually do this when I am under less time pressure. It doesn't even have to be the same day. I'm not strict about completeness because if I don't care... well I don't care.
I have circled back to using the apps that are already on my phone, especially the Apple Reminders app which I am currently trying out as my main notes and ideas system.
I have placed it as one of the two bottom widgets on the lock screen which gives me immediate access to everything I need to capture a thought: a main note, the list where I want to store it (e.g., work or personal), the notes field if more context is needed, and I can flag it or schedule a reminder. The app then also has an optional auto-categorize feature which works quite well. Add to that reliable sync across devices and except for a good way to bulk export lists, this has everything I want from a quick draft and capture system.
I use sheets of junk paper (e.g. stuff I got in the mail that is only printed on one side). I keep an "active" one that I cross stuff out from, etc. When I start a new one (about once a week) I go through the old one and port over any remaining items; most of the time I discard the whole thing since it's no longer relevant. If there are important items that are just too big to handle I'll transcribe it to my Calendar, Linear, Reminders app, etc.
To me this is a good balance of: - Writing things down is the major benefit for me, writing down on physical paper is even more helpful. - Forces me to garbage collect irrelevant stuff. - I don't need an app or even to buy paper really.
I have a similar system. I keep my wip.md open in Neovim all the time and the difference is: everyday, I move the done items to a timestamped file. I have records going back to 2009.
It's my timelog and work journal as I expand on items and mark them off as I work on them.
Incidently, I was exploring new ways to work with it recently: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:bryys25pc2fnagnyxqgsglhd/po...
quite the consistency. congratulations.
do you also keep personal notes? I'm inspired
Only some and in recent years. The first few years was just timelog like:
11:11 AM - 12:17 PM QuoteEveryday
1:44 PM - 4:57 PM ContractWork:XXX
1:06 AM - 1:26 AM Blog
2:19 AM - 2:40 AM ContractWork:XXX
then I started the logs and TODOs underneath, which now form the bulk of the files.
In recent years, I have some non-work stuff that I do at my computer; those are logged.
fzf is really useful here!
This is the way. Obviously as mentioned, a calendar is a pre-requisite and for me so are various note-taking/writing systems such as a physical notebook, more .txt files, and sometimes heavier stuff like Google Docs. But those are only for deeper work or archival stuff. Most everything starts and and ends right in thst one .txt file. Each day new stuff goes at the top. Sometimes I go through it and delete things that have become meaningless or will never be useful.
I've done the same thing for a long time
The only extra thing is I set up autohotkey macros
For example typing $today or $yesterday will insert the date with a dividing line underneath to separate days into clear blocks
I've tried a lot of different note apps and what I eventually realized is that when it comes to work, I generally don't actually care about old notes 98% of the time.
I only really care about the last week or two and when everything is in one file its optimized for viewing that, like a working memory.
The text file ends up gigantic but its still small data for a computer even after many years of adding to a single file and searching is still fast.
I recently discovered AutoHotKey and their subreddit. Your example is a cool feature I didn't know about. I'm looking forward to using AHK.
https://old.reddit.com/r/AutoHotkey/
I first read this blog post about a year ago I think. It was a bit after I started developing my own personal productivity app. It got me really excited because my philosophy is extremely similar, and it seems to resonate with people.
I'm still working on the app today but planning to get it out into the world in the new year. I think anyone who enjoys this notepad technique will find it quite familiar but just "powered up" maybe.
Google Keep for me is the way to go. Easy to use on desktop or mobile, can "share" anything with it. I like to make notes with various titles & colors that I use to organize my life/thoughts.
I am incredibly jealous of people for who this works for. Mine just become too unwieldy to manage or work with because they grow out in a crazy fashion.
My "productivity solution" is currently TriliumNotes with three work spaces as 1) Planner with sub notes for year, month, day 2) Brain Dump with subnotes for year and month 3) Projects with sub notes for each project. I manage tasks with Vikunja and then my time with Google Calendar.
It's an absolute mess, but it's the closest I've gotten to a solution that works the way my brain does.
Thank you for sharing. I feel similar to you; jealous this system works for others, sounds like a dream, but too overwhelming for me once it hits some point of no return. Your structure sounds interesting.
I'm genuinely curious how others do not get overwhelmed or sucked into yak-shaving some reorganization of a system like this.
While we're here, let me go ahead and once again give much praise to https://zim-wiki.org , my daily driver for most things in my life.
It was really interesting to see the sort of "second stage" discovery of things like this when obsidian got hot, and I toyed with many of those for a while.
And the end result was me getting even further back into doing what zim does, and even finding new cool little time savers (e.g. interwiki links).
I’ve been using a DOS editor called Carousel. The “carousel” bit is that you can cycle through a number of files in named directories. Every day you start with a new file named by date.
https://partytimehexcellent.itch.io/carousel
I live in iOS notes. I can access them from phone, home and work computers. I have a work and non-work todo list and notes for about a million other things. Whenever I book a flight or hotel or something, I just paste a screenshot of it in my todo note. No more digging up details from an email or searching through some other system. I even wrote a book using iOS notes as my primary research recording tool.
Something like this would be perfect for a local LLM assistant.
Agreed. I'm working on a small GUI that just appends to a local .ndjson file. A user just posts with a text box into a feed. Like a one person chat or tweeting into the void. And a local LLM picks apart metadata, storing just enough to index where answers to future questions will be. Then you can use slash commands to get at the analysis like "/tasks last month" or "/summarize work today" etc.
Not sure why you're getting downvoted, but I agree at least in principle. There should be some means to index/search this kind of semi-structured text. Summaries are also nice, but not as useful to me at least.
Like the author I also do tagging, but in the real world some notes will eventually slip through the cracks. Even when it's just one, that's probably the one you're looking for. :)
Either grep or hyperstraier. You don't need an LLM.
A LLM may be able to give you all the paragraphs referring to frobnicating widget X including misspellings and notes not referring to it by name.
It's "AI" right? It could right?
I used Notational Velocity for years. I loved its free form approach to note taking and searching, but I needed a cross platform solution with files that could be shared using Dropbox.
https://notational.net/
I now just use three text files open in Sublime Text: todo-today.txt, todo-this-week.txt, and todo-later.txt. I review them daily and promote todos to the next file when appropriate.
Personally, I just use obsidian notes. Its simple enough, uses markdown, syncs to my phone. I like to break projects/problems out into checklists. Helps keep me motivated.
I don't use the 'linking' feature between notes. The whole 'second brain' thing seems like something you do to make a neat screenshot of your note graph. I just use regular old folders like a file directory. My notes have gotten a little messy though.
The nice thing about linking is that you can embrace the chaos a bit and not need to have everything organized into folders.
Transclusions (embeds) are very useful also.
I agree that the note graph visualizer is just a gimmick though.
I do this with plain text but hear me out:
multiple files
multiple directories (folders)
(scripts)
I have a file like this, several years long, but parsed with YAML so that each day is clearly separated from the next, and for list parsing, and for dictionary parsing so each project I work on is associated with a YAML dictionary key. I can go back in time and easily find notes related to specific projects or specific dates.
Forever open tabs in Notepad++ (475 and counting for the lost 6 months at least).
I've used so many 'productivity' apps, it makes me sick to think of it. This has been the most consistent tool I've ever used.
https://snipboard.io/9CYXnw.jpg
Mine is as well. Well actually one TXT file per project. Still, they are tens of megabytes in total size at this point.
I’ve landed in Amplenote and haven’t looked back over the last couple of years.
Exports to mark down if I ever want to leave, works on everything, and sufficiently flexible for note taking and task management.
Every now and then I get the productivity bug and look around but can’t find anything that hits like Amplenote does.
I have TXT files by week, and sum up each day to the bottom of each day of the week if that makes sense.
Then the next week's new file has the pasted-over to-do items on top.
These were OneNote/Sharepoint files forever until earlier this year. Now they live on my local network, backed up, glaciered.
Actual checkboxes that are reorderable but otherwise a text file is the way to go.
Longer explanation: https://zachsaucier.com/blog/notes-the-best-todo-app/
I do this, but it’s an Apple Notes file with a quick open shortcut mapped to the action button (side button) on my iPhone.
I finally figured this setup this year. It had changed my life, in a minor yet significant way.
(I also link to other relevant text files at the top of the doc)
I've been doing pretty much the same thing since 2019. The only big change I made was in early 2023, when I started saving a new version of the long txt file each day. It works very well for me but I recognize it isn't the right system for everyone!
I've had a similar system for a while, but the primary pain point is the lack of access on iPhone / iPad. Giant text files are laggy, dropbox integration is poor, etc. A custom app that interacts with the text file might be the best bet :D
What I realized at least for me is that work notes and personal notes are two different use cases
The .txt file approach works for work stuff because I never need to reference it on mobile, if I'm doing software development I need to be on a computer anyway.
Whereas personal stuff I need an actual notetaking app like Notion for the mobile usability
A cool implementation of this is - https://heynote.com/
Pretty sure I found it here.
Obsidian + Lights (https://ultraworking.gitbooks.io/lights/content/) is my stack
Same here, what ever tools I tried, I keep going back to my txt files. Now I use cursor to edit these txt files and get some amazing auto suggestions given the rich context!
I use Google Calendar as my todo list. Syncs across devices. Notifications. Share with Family & Work. Repeating tasks. Supports notes and attachments. Multiple Lists (calendars). Free.
Same. And by default it sends an email reminder, so the stuff I didn't do yet stay as unread emails in my inbox.
If you append to the bottom of a 50-thousand line file, won't scrolling to the bottom be tedious? Or is he prepending new days to the top of the file?
It's just one press of the G key in Vim, or Alt > in Emacs. Even nano has Alt / to jump to the end of a file.
I find those preferable to reading things in reverse order, but Vim opens up at the last location anyway so it's usually just there.
Like most people I think, I prefer to prepend and add to the top of the txt file they are working on.
If you read the article then it's clear they don't just use a .txt file, but also a calendar.
So maybe there's an app that combines the two?
My OBTF (one big text file) is in org syntax. I can attach timestamps to items and have them show up in an agenda view for the week or day.
Use a mix of the iCloud notes app, txt files, iCloud sync'd Documents directory; I’m deffo vendor locked.
Better than choosing between 2000 productivity apps,
And even better than coding the 2001st one.
Effectively the same, but with Joplin and separated notes for separated context.
Store/ version with git, throw Claude code at it, and it’ll be amazing
It just seems like a modern academic is a middle manager.
I read this a few years ago and start to doing that. And I never looked back. I can search what i did on a specific day, search for a task and see all the traces, having it accessible over dropbox.
No upgrade CTA, no nonsense. now even I can feed it to llm and get feedback about my planning, routines and everything
alias j="vim + ~/.journal.txt"
big ol git repo of text files here, It's always been this way, for over a decade now.
I ended up doing a similar thing when I was a contractor. Just a really long note file that I'd track everything I was doing.
Relatedly, I find all of the todo/task management apps to be utterly overwhelming for my person tasks. I'm so tired of all of the task apps adding way too much complexity.
All I want is:
* Something that's available on all of my devices.
* Can be ordered by sections
* Let's me add a task without thinking (default to triage)* Lets me drag-and-drop tasks for ordering
> 3:45pm advising meet with Oprah
> 4pm Rihanna talk (368 CIT)
> 5pm 1:1 with Beyonce #phdadvisee
> 6pm faculty interview dinner with Madonna
lol
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