I use a single flat text file, and use it for years. I have an editor macro that adds a new, timestamped entry at the end of the file, which looks something like this:
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27-Oct-2022 9:38:48 am
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The bar is where my cursor lands, all ready to start typing. A simple alias ("note") brings up the file. I can make a note in a second or two, then get back to what I was doing.
I dump everything into this file. At my last job, my notes file was maybe 20-30MB and nearly a decade old. I record hard-won knowledge, TODO items, pieces of debug sessions that are interesting, little notes about what's going on, jokes and random thoughts, contact info, whatever. Editors load big files fast, and incremental search works great. The idea is to make this practice fast, nearly frictionless, and not adopt complications that are tough to maintain over time.
I've found that the less formal and structured I make things, the more notes I take; if I had to conform to a schema it would be a burden. No Emacs modes. No email or contact or TODO-system integration. Just notes.
It's saved my butt more times that I can remember. It's great to have at review time, too.
I had to set keybinding to C-c C-n because I got unmatched parentheses error with C-M-n.
I've been slowly moving to emacs since this summer and got to where I like it better than Vim. I was "forced" to learn it as I am learning Lisp (started with Clojure but moved to Common Lisp).
i guess with yasnippet something like this, but may need a more to open your note file and expand the snippet (with yas-expand) at the top of the file.
It's far, far faster. I can edit multi-gigabyte files without thinking much about it, my last attempt to open a 10GB log with Emacs did not go well.
I also think it's got much better integration with Windows, though I can't point at anything in particular. (Its integration on MacOS is less wonderful).
It also helps that its defaults mostly line up with my own preferences in an editor, though this is highly subjective.
I use a single flat text file, and use it for years. I have an editor macro that adds a new, timestamped entry at the end of the file, which looks something like this:
The bar is where my cursor lands, all ready to start typing. A simple alias ("note") brings up the file. I can make a note in a second or two, then get back to what I was doing.I dump everything into this file. At my last job, my notes file was maybe 20-30MB and nearly a decade old. I record hard-won knowledge, TODO items, pieces of debug sessions that are interesting, little notes about what's going on, jokes and random thoughts, contact info, whatever. Editors load big files fast, and incremental search works great. The idea is to make this practice fast, nearly frictionless, and not adopt complications that are tough to maintain over time.
I've found that the less formal and structured I make things, the more notes I take; if I had to conform to a schema it would be a burden. No Emacs modes. No email or contact or TODO-system integration. Just notes.
It's saved my butt more times that I can remember. It's great to have at review time, too.