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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 store a bunch of...Submitted by monorailmike (not verified) on August 18, 2005 - 4:09am.
I store a bunch of the previously mentioned "handy lists" in my old-school Palm IIIxe: some high-level goals, my workout log, CDs and books to buy, DVDs to rent, ideas for blog entries, and so on. The ones I update most frequently are named with an asterisk so they appear at the top of the alphabetically sorted list:
As often as I can, I export the data in two formats: (1) a Palm-specific backup file (.mpa format), and (2) a single text file that I can view in any editor. So, the collective backup of my notes takes the form of a single file, but I would never want to search through all of my notes on a regular basis. I find that it's much easier to break things out by subject. As for other types of data (appointments, contacts, tasks), I store them in an appropriate Palm utility (Date Book, Address, To Do List, respectively) and export the data to Palm-specific formats for backups as well. Using a strictly single-file approach for everything sounds dangerous to me — it treats critical, everyday, and archived information the same way, and it's a single point of failure. I suppose it could work for some people, but you'd better make a backup of your single file frequently, and then make a backup of your backup! » POSTED IN:
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