Home › Blogs › Merlin's blog ›

Life inside one big text file

Submitted by Merlin on August 17, 2005 - 3:28am.

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.

As Danny O’Brien discovered during his research into effective organizational habits of geeks, text is the simplest, most platform-independent, fastest-to-search format we have for storing information. So everything I need - from todos, blog posts in progress, article ideas, addresses, my list of books to read, the shopping list, and much more besides, lives in just the one file. In effect, I live in that file. When I’m sitting in front of my computer, it feels like home.

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:

  • What tips do you have for people considering the big move?
  • What tricks do you use to organize, automate, and move around in your huge-ass text file?
  • How do you decide where new stuff goes within a mutli-thousand line document?
  • Are you using section and sub-section headings to jump around?
  • How do you handle versions and multiple drafts of subsections (like, say, blog posts)
  • Got any sweet Vim tricks to share?
  • Any point where this approach starts to fall apart?
  • Have you found you think about your work differently when you work inside only one file?

Spill whatever you like about your one-file system (and, curious folks, feel free to ask questions).

Related Stuff

in

I have been experimenting with...

Submitted by Robert Daeley (not verified) on August 17, 2005 - 4:56am.

I have been experimenting with Giles’s method recently – the tagging allows for some complex filtering and manipulation on the CLI that you just don’t get otherwise. However, one of the key points of this plaintext idea is that you can use whatever text tool you want, i.e. vim, TextWrangler, TextEdit, whatever.

This has fit in quite well with my effort lately to do what I’m calling Reducing Friction – smoothing the process of getting items into the todo queue, worked on, and into the done list as much as possible. This includes reducing distractions in the working environment, visual and otherwise.

I’ve written up an article here about it, expanding the thought. Thanks to Giles for the inspiration.