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Ask HN: Anyone else use a single gigantic .txt file as a notetaking solution?

4•superconduct123•5h ago
For the last 3 years I've just been using notepad in windows and a single .txt file to keep notes for my programming job.

Every day I just open the file and add a new divider for the day at the top of the file like this:

May 13, 2025

------------------------

After 3 years I'm at 25,000 lines, 700KB in size

* Its super fast and lightweight

* notepad opens instantly

* notepad takes up very little screen space

* searching is still instant with CTRL + F

* Want to tag something? Just write "tag:something" and search for that later

It sounds kind of stupid at first, like how do you quickly get to old notes?

But I've realized over time I generally only care about the last week or 2 of notes and rarely reference older ones.

I'm curious if anyone else does this and what your stats are for the file and if you ran into any issues

Comments

tonetheman•4h ago
I used to do this and it worked pretty well I thought.

I eventually broke it into years (YYYY-MM-DD-notes.txt and just grep'd the directory.

Finally I made it to markdown files also stored in the same directory.

It was great for searching.

bn-l•4h ago
I use markdown in an IDE (vscode). It’s very nice. You get: some formatting, auto indentation, indentation, identifier search (jump to heading with fuzzy search), code highlighting, etc.
sherdil2022•4h ago
Aren’t you worried about a single point of failure if you keep everything in 1 file?
OhMeadhbh•4h ago
yes. though i have a bunch of large files, one per project. but grep works on one file as easy as several, so i've started doing a week per file in a per-project directory.
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