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.<p>Every day I just open the file and add a new divider for the day at the top of the file like this:<p>May 13, 2025<p>------------------------<p>After 3 years I'm at 25,000 lines, 700KB in size<p>* Its super fast and lightweight<p>* notepad opens instantly<p>* notepad takes up very little screen space<p>* searching is still instant with CTRL + F<p>* Want to tag something? Just write "tag:something" and search for that later<p>It sounds kind of stupid at first, like how do you quickly get to old notes?<p>But I've realized over time I generally only care about the last week or 2 of notes and rarely reference older ones.<p>I'm curious if anyone else does this and what your stats are for the file and if you ran into any issues
By Karpathy: <a href="https://karpathy.bearblog.dev/the-append-and-review-note/" rel="nofollow">https://karpathy.bearblog.dev/the-append-and-review-note/</a>
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.
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.
I used to do this and it worked pretty well I thought.<p>I eventually broke it into years (YYYY-MM-DD-notes.txt and just grep'd the directory.<p>Finally I made it to markdown files also stored in the same directory.<p>It was great for searching.