My Productivity App Is a Never-Ending .txt File (2020)
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The simplicity and effectiveness of using a never-ending .txt file as a productivity app has sparked a lively debate, with some commenters marveling at the system's longevity and others questioning the author's reluctance to improve it. While some, like jaffa2, argue that building an app would undermine the system's agnosticism and simplicity, others, like mt_, suggest that a custom frontend could enhance the experience. As commenters like swatcoder and rogerrogerr highlight the benefits of this low-tech approach, including zero dependencies and maximal portability, others, like egypturnash, wonder why the author wouldn't want to optimize a system that's worked for 14 years. The discussion reveals a consensus on the value of simplicity and portability, with many praising the author's unorthodox yet effective approach.
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- 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.
Oh I’m totally putting this in a performance review this year.
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?
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.
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 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.
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. :)
It's "AI" right? It could right?
Not so great for a productivity app, IME, though. Persistence is a challenge, as are filtering and aggregation across pages. Also, remembering to actually bring it to the grocery store.
That would make it easier to not lose information, but I don't think it makes it any easier of a productivity app.
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++
What have you moved on to?
Must be a me thing, then.
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.
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.
[0] https://easyorgmode.com/docs/org-agenda
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 tens of items. 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, 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).
Recreation section as a 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..
I would say, just as you would about OneNote, Keep is the most important piece of software in my life.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39432876
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29661167
My productivity app is a never-ending .txt file (2022) - 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)
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 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
I only really care about the last week or two and its easy to scroll back to see that.
The text file ends up gigantic but its still small data for a computer even after many years of adding to a single file. Searching with CTRL + F is still fast.
https://old.reddit.com/r/AutoHotkey/
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.
Not sure if that's a good or bad thing.
How did you find out about these? Are they documented somewhere?
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm genuinely curious how others do not get overwhelmed or sucked into yak-shaving some reorganization of a system like this.
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
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.
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.
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.
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).
2025-12.md, 2026-01.md, Etc
Source: spent too much of my life creating monthly financial reports.
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, 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?
Markdown also falls outside the pre-2000 window as well. But, it's closely based on email and news conventions.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It was 20 wasted years of running in circles. Lots of motion, little progress.
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.
It is absolutely inferior to a database-like binary format for querying, sorting, searching etc. It's a good tool for certain jobs.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod_Touch
- Nix
- Performant Virtualization
- 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 pipeline. Most of my core software tools haven't changed appreciably since the mid 2000s.
What does this mean? Googling "ssh integration ghostty" just got me "shell integration" which I'm guessing is not the same thing.
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. Certainly, everything still depends on C.
Is it the browser, or the websites getting more and more resource-intensive as hardware (and also browser optimizations) got better and more powerful?
- 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
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.
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.
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!)
The biggest issue is outsourcing agency and skills atrophy
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.
Below is progress from like 2010. Archlinux is from 2002, but was nowhere near as popular/well-known in 2010 as it is today.
archlinux, i3, chrome sometimes, browser web inspector, smartphones, bluetooth's gotten a heck of a lot better since then (more reliable, less power hungry), rust is pretty cool, google translate, amazon and online retail in general (including improvements in surrounding industries like banks allowing blocking use of your credit card immediately through a single tap/click, and having more widespread use of deliveries with tracking), youtube, SATA -> SSD -> nvme drives, 3d printers, mobile internet, unlimited cellphone minutes and sms with long distance and roaming included throughout the continent, lithium batteries, LED bulbs, bluetooth earbuds (the kind where you can use one for one ear while the other charges in the battery pack, and then alternate), docker and possibly container technology in general, widespread SSL/TLS use
Vue is a huge improvement over jQuery, is the first one that roughly hit your timeframe.
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)...
>>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.
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.
Some early Debian version would be a great virtual machine, similar to using DOSBox, as a kind of bedrock system that you know you can always (and cheaply) run virtualized. I looked at some other Linux distributions as well, but I like about Debian how easy it was to still download an official ISO and just have everything available, locally, without relying on any cloud service beyond that single downloaded file (possibly a second file to download if you also want the full source code for all the packages).
What this is:
$ diary # opens vim to $DIARYDIR/year/month/day.md
I don’t even login into account. I use it as a blank canvas and delete contents each day, even if I didn’t finish something. For longer term stuff or something I have to do in future, I use calendar or Reminders app.
Each day is a new plan with rough estimates of time the task will take. This way I can keep track of small bureaucracy stuff I did through the day.
My productivity measure is usually how much time I spent in code or in designing architecture. When I feel like I wasn’t productive any day, I see a huge wall of checkmarks with other stuff I did. It is also satisfying to have good estimates on tasks.
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.
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.
No upgrade CTA, no nonsense. now even I can feed it to llm and get feedback about my planning, routines and everything
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).
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.
:-)
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?
Longer explanation: https://zachsaucier.com/blog/notes-the-best-todo-app/
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.
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.
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
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
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