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I've given up on using any sort of branded app for notetaking. At best it's open source and the maintainers will lose interest in a few years.

When you write things down, you're investing in your future. It's silly to use software that isn't making that same investment.

After trying Evernote, wikis, org-mode, and essentially everything else I could find, I gave up and tried building my own system for notes. Plain timestamped markdown files linked together. Edited with vim and a few bash scripts, rendered with a custom deployment of Gollum. All in a git repo. It's... wonderful. Surprisingly easy. Fast. If there's a feature I wish it had, I can write a quick bash script to implement it. If Gollum stops being maintained, I can use whatever the next best markdown renderer is. Markdown isn't going away anytime soon.

It's liberating to be in control. I find myself more eager to write things down. I'm surprised more people don't do the same.

Here's what my system looks like on mobile https://imgur.com/a/nGplj. I usually SSH into the tmux session from a computer.

When it comes to the act of journaling itself, I’ve found that sometimes I feel like typing, sometimes I feel like speaking, and sometimes I feel like writing on paper. The most important thing is that the barrier to Just Writing is as low as possible.

With this setup, I just need to run `new_journal` and I’m dropped into a new Markdown file where I can just write. If I feel like speaking or writing on paper, I have workflows (https://workflow.is) on my phone for creating journal entries from voice memos or photos with one tap.



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