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
- Merlin's blog
- 43975 reads
Funny that this should come...
Funny that this should come up. Being an old Unix grouch, I started a prototype GTD system where I just have all of my next actions in a single file – one task per line with “[Context]” thrown on the end. I was pulling the relevant context using grep at the command line. Frex, if I wanted to look at my “Out of House]” context I typed:
grep -i “out of house” nextactions.txt
This looked promising as Hell, but in the end I decided to stick with OmniOutliner for the time being because I decided that I was shaving the proverbial yak. The urge to tinker with the system was overtaking me, and I made myself stop.