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Life inside one big text file
Merlin Mann | Aug 17 2005
O’Reilly Network Weblogs: Living in text files Giles takes one of the biggest, geekiest leaps you can—moving all of his stuff into a single big-ass plain text file.
This ambitious strategy—usually only whispered about among the lower geek echelons in which I dwell—seems to require a lot of confidence, planning, and familiarity with your favorite flavor of text editor. Mine’s currently TextMate, but, given what I’ve seen people like Danny do with Vim (and its incremental search-on-steroids, scripting functions, and endless shortcuts and configurability), this really reignites my resolve to hit the book and thumb through all my bookmarks again. So. Questions for people who are already living in one text file:
Spill whatever you like about your one-file system (and, curious folks, feel free to ask questions). Related Stuff 74 Comments
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 I myself have a lot...Submitted by Brett (not verified) on August 17, 2005 - 4:45pm.
I myself have a lot of experience with typing personal files - I typed a diary that went for 5 years in MS Dos Edit (80 column lines! customizeable back and text colour!). It worked out well for me, the main things that I did to sort it out was to rigidly type the same stuff at the start of each day (I wrote daily) - JournalStart 17/8/05 Normal Entry (this is meant to be tabbed) xxxx stuff here The tab was important, as was that the journal start was 3 spaces down from the last one... the reason for this was that i intended to write a simple program that went through and looked for those two things and made them into whatever I wanted programaticly. I also have like a file on my desktop that I plonk anything i see thats cool - phone conversations when im at the pc, websites etc... I make sure I write a one line description of what I pasted when I can though, so when I do a search I can usually find it very quickly because a word or two i can remember. By the way, I use notepad, ARGGH!! lol. Well it loads fast anyway. The idea behind that is that I don't have to spend time at the most critical time of organising my stuff - when I just want to put stuff in and im in a rush! its more important that its there at all in my opinion, and this helps me greatly. Now if only the PSP has a keyboard addon and a text editor... PS - nice post guys! » POSTED IN:
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