plain text notes
What I have tried before
Basically all you can think of. I started with paper notes and then moved to text files at my first job. But for some reason I thought I needed more.
I was using OneNote for few years and actually really liked it until had problems with syncing notes and realized that there is no way to backup, extract, export or import notes. So I tried Evernote and other types of those apps - all being lesser than OneNote and having the same issue or other restrictions. Then I've tried using Google Docs for notes but it was just too damn slow.
Also one of my issues with all those approaches was privacy. Some company was owning my notes and there were certain things that I could not put in there. So in the end I went back to text notes.
I could easily version and sync those using git and protect using encryption. They were also blazingly fast and with a little knowledge of how grep works I could find anything in an instant which was not so easy with other solutions.
Markup language does not help with notes either
But not plain text yet 'cause I thought that I needed some kind of markup language for structure and to be able to easily convert my notes to different formats like: html, doc or pdf. So ofc I tried Markdown, AsciiDoc and others.
One will quickly discover that maintaining the correct markup slows you down and you never actually use any of it's features. You can't just convert your notes to a different format anyway because you always have to do just a little editing before sending your notes as an email or before putting them on the website or into a doc/pdf document. So the idea of keeping your notes in a markup language so you can publish those in different places never worked out for me.
No matter how little markup you think there is in Your favorite markup language there is enough to make keeping notes tedious or slower or less readable without a renderer. Also ironically it will always lack this one feature to express what you want. And having a markup language does not mean your notes are organized - you can have mess even when using the best of the best of the note taking system.
Freedom - many plain text files with no structure
Also bad, but you have to try things before you discover that the boring solutions are the best.
So after going back to text files and discovering that markup languages are not actually that useful for notes I did what most of us would do: I started creating many files and organizing those into directories.
Separate TODO.txt file, and DONE.txt file, and
NOTE.txt file, and one file for each project, and a separate file
for each task. One will quickly realize that with increasing amount of files
the problem of where something is or where something should be put in grows
exponentially.
Lack of markup language makes it so that each file is an universe on it's own and each one looks and reads differently, has different formatting or order of information.
Then you try to reference stuff from other files and you rediscover problem
of linking which was solved by first html documents.
Boring solution
So finally after many years of struggle I came back to how I used to keep notes at my first job and that is: as little files as possible and each one with the same structure:
notes.txt .-------------------------------------------------------------. | The most important header notes... | | | | # Links | | http://link.to.website | | Description.... | | | | # Topic 1 | | Desc.... | | | | # Topic 2 | | Desc... | | | | # dd.mm.yyyy (day of the week) Place - topic | | [x] a task | | [x] a task | | [x] a task | | | | # dd.mm.yyyy (day of the week) Place - topic | | Some notes for this day not related to any task. | | | | [x] a task | | | | Task description.... | | | | [x] other task for the day | | | | Task description.... | | | | [ ] a task for the future not assigned to any day | | [ ] a task for the future not assigned to any day | | [ ] a task for the future not assigned to any day | '-------------------------------------------------------------'
The simpler the better but some structure and order is required.
The exact format does not matter as much as just keeping your files structure
consistent - and a simple single indent is probably all you need. All my files
follow the same convention and I have just a few of those for broad topics
like: notes.txt, company.txt,
programming.txt. They are quite big but that is way easier to
handle than multiple smaller files and also faster to work with.
I'm still using this system since 2018.
🐘 What about pictures?
Let's address the elephant in the room: what about pictures?
In
plain text files you cannot store images or videos or graphs or tables.
All of which are very useful when taking notes.
So it probably depends on the type of notes you are taking but it turns out to not be as big as an issue as you think. I occasionally have some images next to the text files in the same directory and that is the end of the story.
When it comes to tables and graphs there are two situations:
- you either need a spreadsheet anyway,
- simple ASCII text table or list will suffice.
Storing media files inside your notes makes them less usable, oftentimes too small to actually see and you have to reference them by name and open separately anyway. Making a document, book or writing an email is a different story but for your personal or project notes the text covers 97% of your needs.
summary.txt
Small, fast, easy to archive, easy to share, easy to encrypt, easy to have history of changes and sync using any version control tool, quick to search through, works everywhere, the smallest friction to actually do useful work.
Stop fooling around with tools and just type text.