HACKER Q&A
📣 gofreddygo

How do you manage your plain text notes


I have notes scattered around in my notebook, email, git, personal wikis and some files across 5 devices (2 of which I do not own).

I am consolidating them all in plain text. I tag each text file with topic, date and context keywords. I use grep and awk to create "views" into them. Works great.

What does not work great is on the phone (which is where I need it the most for reading and cross references)

I do not want to get locked into proprietary formats or platforms. This is just plain text.

What are my options ?

  👤 stockkid Accepted Answer ✓
> I tag each text file with topic, date and context keywords.

Nice idea. How are you doing that? Also, do you version control your notes?

> What does not work great is on the phone

I maintain an open source project called Dnote (https://github.com/dnote/dnote) which solves this problem for you. It's basically a command line notebook using SQLite + a mobile friendly web interface to which you can sync your notes.

Agree with you that we should avoid being locked into a proprietary formats or platforms. Businesses and platforms come and go, but our notes should stay as readily accessible as possible.

👤 Maha-pudma
I don't do notes on my phone. I manage all my notes with zim-wiki. It's cross platform and portable on Windows so no installation. Plain text and folders for organisation, search is fast. Has tagging and dating built-in.
👤 ianmf
For me, it depends on what the note is for. I store all my personal notes in Apple Notes. When I am at work and I need to store personal notes, I use my Google Keep that I will move to Apple Notes when I get home (Apple iCloud is blocked at work but not google ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ). At work, I store all my notes in OneNote. OneNote is by far the best note taking tool I have ever used. I wish the Mac version was better. On my Kali box, I use Cherrynotes. I only use it for HackTheBox. If Microsoft would have a good linux and Mac version, I would use it instead of the others.
👤 stevekemp
If you use emacs then org-mode is a natural suggestion.

Personally I have two git repositories that store org-mode files; one for a work-journal, and one for personal files ("DIARY.org", "BIRTHDAYS.org", "REFERENCE.org", etc).

Random reminders/ad-hoc tasks I use google's todo-list, because it is easy to work with on a mobile. I just have a couple of tasks "things to buy" with subtasks for things I need to remember (e.g. "buy bleach") and a couple of scheduled tasks "change toothbrush", "clean windows".

👤 drexlspivey
Upload them to a git repo and download GitJournal, it can sync from/to git