Ask HN: Anyone else use a single gigantic .txt file as a notetaking solution?

  • Aren’t you worried about a single point of failure if you keep everything in 1 file?

  • yes. though i have a bunch of large files, one per project. but grep works on one file as easy as several, so i've started doing a week per file in a per-project directory.

  • I use markdown in an IDE (vscode). It’s very nice. You get: some formatting, auto indentation, indentation, identifier search (jump to heading with fuzzy search), code highlighting, etc.

  • I used to do this and it worked pretty well I thought.

    I eventually broke it into years (YYYY-MM-DD-notes.txt and just grep'd the directory.

    Finally I made it to markdown files also stored in the same directory.

    It was great for searching.