markwhen VS notes

The creator of this (Chee Aun) is quite prolific and creative with their work (https://cheeaun.com/projects/).

They created https://cheeaun.life, a timeline of their life, more than 10 years ago (which looks to be kept up to date), which was my inspiration for markwhen (https://markwhen.com).

Markwhen

Looks like markwhen[0]. When making it, which initially started out as a strictly timeline-making tool, I realized it is essentially a log or journal language - write a date, any date, and add some stuff to it. Good for notes, blogging, a calendar, etc etc.

[0] https://markwhen.com

https://markwhen.com

I’ve had a lot of these thoughts when working on markwhen. It’s basically turning into a calendar and planning IDE, pretty excited about where it’s heading.

https://markwhen.com - very cool. however, If I could share with you, I would see the value in following case: if I could connect my calendar(s) to it and see what is going on and overlay it with the data here in comment. Use case is both - for retrospective and for planning (for example if you're preparing the meeting and don't want to share content just yet, or jotting something for time in-between meeting what to do, etc)

I realized just over the weekend that the side project I'm working on is in fact a kind of journaling language. It has passed through a number of iterations, started out as a timeline maker (and still does that best), but at the end of the day is a spec for writing what happened when. Or indeed what you hope will happen in the future - I find it's a good planning tool too.

I find myself actually journaling now that I don't have to think about where I'm going to do it, or in the case of most note-taking apps, which note I should put my current thought in. Journal it first, and if it deserves to be somewhere else, move it later.

The project is https://markwhen.com

https://markwhen.com

Timelines in markdown (gantt, calendar, map, other views)

It's open source (https://github.com/mark-when/markwhen) and there are some paid options for storing markwhen documents in the cloud.

Straddling paid SAAS and open source is a bit tricky and I still haven't figured it out completely yet. I have some sponsors as well as some paid saas clients but it's not quite paying the bills yet... I like working on it though, hopefully I can find the right balance or a different revenue model that works better.

Are you familiar with markdown? If so, try markwhen.

I've been doing something similar for ~20 years at: https://github.com/nickjj/notes

    - Running `notes` will open this month's notes for YYYY_MM.txt

I use a very command line focused approach with https://github.com/nickjj/notes.

Since about 2001 I used YYYY-MM.txt plain text files and have a shell script to help create notes in the most friendly way I could think of from the command line at https://github.com/nickjj/notes.

Totally works fine for a knowledge log when you're streaming high level details. I still use it today.

But when you want to really go all-in with in-depth notes it's tricky because in 1 month's time if you're hardcore deep in the woods of learning, applying and using something you're going to end up with hundreds of concepts from an assorted set of tools and it kind of stinks to have all of that info sitting in 1 file. Think about using something like Kubernetes. That's really Kubernetes, Kustomize / Helm, EKS, various cloud hosting details (networking, etc.), Terraform and ton of super useful commands / context. Details you for sure want recorded for later.

For this type of info I've been building up a knowledge base with https://obsidian.md/. It's really nice and I highly recommend it. It's been working well for keeping things reasonably categorized without wasting a lot of time on the details around keeping links and tags up to date. It also has Vim mode that's good enough where day to day writing feels natural.

Did you end up automating the entries?

For example, I have a command line note taking script at https://github.com/nickjj/notes.

It creates a YYYY-MM-DD.txt file and doesn't include time stamps but it would be a 1 line change to make each entry get timestamped. I didn't do that because personally I'm more interested in monthly notes not per minute.

But I do think removing the barrier of creating entries is an important step with jotting things down, this way you can focus on what you want to write and not the boilerplate.

A whole bunch of little things, mainly command line tools.

Most of them are open source and also have extensive documentation and a screencast video going over them.

In no specific order:

- https://github.com/nickjj/notes

- https://github.com/nickjj/invoice

- https://github.com/nickjj/wait-until

And a few recent little scripts to solve specific things:

- https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/using-ffmpeg-to-get-an-mp3s-d...

- https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/a-shell-script-to-keep-a-bunc...

- https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/bash-aliases-to-prepare-recor...

Along similar lines, nickjj also has a similar (but bash) notes script at:

https://github.com/nickjj/notes

While I don't use it personally there's: https://obsidian.md/

It's cross platform and works offline. You write markdown and it produces a visual graph of your data. It supports interlinking notes, tags and images too.

Plain text notes[0] work best for me but I'd probably use Obsidian if I wanted to see things visually. When I tried it out briefly it was really solid.

[0]: https://github.com/nickjj/notes