Sat Sep 26 02:24:48 PM EDT 2026
Finally starting the blogpost about my notes.
After years of searching for the ways people do notes and lots and lots of trial and error I’ve arrived at a note system that is mostly stable and crystalizing. I may be able to keep this notes system for the next many years and forever. I dream of combining all my notes from every season of my life and just dumping them on the internet somewhere before I die as a sort of immortality or tombstone or monument. To that end I should write all manner of things so that reading through these archives are conversational in parts, informational in others.
The notes archive is quite large and I have every intention of growing them forever like a forest. I’ve learned that this approach makes them too big to approach from one angle or frame. Like the US government or a city its too large for a single person to behold from one vantage point. So we’ll start from the outside.
The outline of my notes are simple. It’s a folder containing thousands of plaintext markdown files. Markdown files have many advantages over using a database if you can find it within yourself to mostly give up images and graphs and other nontext. Some notetaking approaches lock you into a specific proprietary vendor where the notes are stored somewhere else and held hostage, forcing you to pay more and more for them over time for access while they may or may not promise to respect your privacy while datamining them anyway (evernote? many are like this). Better approaches store the notes locally but fall astray when they insist upon using a database (joplin and increasingly, saddeningly, misguidedly, logseq (is their forced move to a database intentional sabotage? their app was glitchy and laggy anyway) ). The best approach uses markdown files locally. I used to use Obisidian but I had to stop when I had dataloss on several occasions after manually ‘saving’ due to its faulty approach to caching files and not letting you have any control or say when it actually writes to files. Now I use vim. Vim is forever, God rest Bram Moolenaar et al. Vim may be a bit schizophrenic with its multiple vimscript languages and strange plugin community (looking at tim pope). I try to never use any nondefault plugins. It all fits in .vimrc or in my utility.sh bash script. It will all probably work forever on any OS I decide to try or am forced to use. It’s a long term bet. And when I tell vim to save the file it does it without lying to me.
There are several things that are not vim in this space. There’s neovim which has even more languages including lua but it keeps changing all the time. Vim is mature and most likely wont break all your stuff when you update it. Hylix is cool but it’s a different paradigm. I’m afraid to get used to helix and then go back to using vim on all 200 computers at work and get confused. Consistency, repetition, and minimalization are my only weapons against burnout in the face of overwhelming things to do all the time forever. That’s also the core of why I hate macos: the damn modifier keys (carabiner is not a good solution). Don’t get me started on paying 100$ for sublime or the dead atom editor or vscode. The company that makes each of them will eventually get bought by private equity or another company and decide you need to pay them a subscription or discontinue them or radically change them into a different product. They are foundations of sand you should avoid building your house upon. Vim is forever. Vim isn’t a dead corpse floating along like acme either, it’s maintained. They even added clipboard support for wayland and fuzzy autocompletion. It’s everything you could need. Zim also exists but as a gui application it’s limited. The terminal will also likely live forever but idk about the gui toolkits zim is based on. You can use whatever you like but I’d say be aware of what the future probably looks like. I’m just tired of everything getting worse all the time. Vim is so stable and traditional at this point some distros try to be edgy by intentionally excluding it by default (which is itself a stable and traditional long term observable trend - throwing things away because the old is somehow worse because its old).
The architecture of my notes. I used to use folders to organize
things but that was always a mess, even with unix tools like find and
bash globstar then I found dendron’s tags in the filename hierarchy [1].
They explain it very well. I remember there being a page where they
describe this naming scheme scaling to 1000 - 10,000 files easily. So
far my largest pile is 2000+ notes and finding things is still a breeze
even without hub notes, just searching via filename (although I’m
cheating a bit at work using servicenow’s TASKxxxx id’s to instantly
find relevant notes via :vimgrep and mappings and patterns like ‘^=
TASKxxxx’). I have a bash script utility.sh I use for renaming files via
grep and sed to hit all the places files are referenced via name. Files
are linked via name because vim can open files by placing the cursor on
a filename and hitting gf. You can have it open a new file
with the filename under cursor with a mapping you can copy straight out
of ‘:help gf’ so navigating and expanding the notes is low friction. I
also use a mapping for running the line the cursor is on as a command
and spitting the line out into the buffer so i can easily write things
like grep stuff *.md or ls tag*subtag and now
the notes are dynamic. I can do ssh commands and loops and pull in
whatever I want. I remember seeing a gui editor that could do stuff like
this but it was limited. You can write your own scripts in a familiar
language to work with your plain text files however you see fit. Total
freedom with all the burdens that comes with. I use git to track and
sync my notes. When I’m done editing I do a gacp 'message'
to combination git add git commit message git push. Then you can git
diff and see changes. This structure allows you to do anything exactly
the way you wish to without extra fees or subscriptions or datamining.
For years it’s actually been the highlight of my life.
I guess that’s it. For a while on and off at work I get spooked and start considering turning the entire pile into one giant encrypted 11MB txt file and developing a new workflow for seaching for things within that. I’ve got it 99% worked out but I still haven’t done it yet. I hope and expect this note style will last for years to come.
references
1 https://wiki.dendron.so/notes/f3a41725-c5e5-4851-a6ed-5f541054d409/