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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'm using a few textfiles,...Submitted by kepart (not verified) on August 17, 2005 - 6:47pm.
i'm using a few textfiles, edited with vim:
I live and breathe out of nextActions.txt, but try to keep it short so there's no distracting long-term ideas there while I'm nose-to-the-grindstone. the file heavily relies on vim's folding mode, customized to work well as an outliner. (i found that the native outlining required some tweaking to allow folds to be collapsed all the way to just a single header line.) nextActions.txt is split into "Today", "Weekend", "Inbox" and a few other sections. projects.txt has the long-term stuff, and I check it every couple days when nextActions.txt starts looking a little thin. this also relies heavily on outlining. calendar.txt has appointments and such. things get copied daily out of here to nextActions.txt. the outline here is according to the calendar year. e.g.,
- january 2005
- week 1
- mon jan 1
- tue jan 2
i wrote a script to generate it for any calendar year.
recurringEvents.txt contains holidays, birthdays, etc. i wrote another script to copy these things into the appropriate places in calendar.txt log.txt is also generated from the same script that generates calendar.txt after setting this up i found myself spending a lot of time navigating around files, so there are some vim keybinding to simplify the mapping. e.g., with a single keypress, the current line (or Visually-selected region) in nextActions.txt is copied to the correct day in log.txt, properly indented and prefixed with the time of day. (it feels so good to hit that button, watch the todo item disappear, and know that it's properly logged!) there are other keys to zoom around between common sections. i actually have this entire setup replicated for home and work. the double-versions is a little bit worrysome, but it seems better to keep things separate. i use unison (awesome file sync tool) to copy my home org/ directory (that contains all these files) to a usb drive so it's available at work. (the work org/ directory stays at work, but there's a section of nextActions.txt in my home setup for work-related things that i remember at home that need to be copied later.) the whole system is still evolving... please drop me a line if you have questions or suggestions! » POSTED IN:
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