I Still Use Plain Text for Everything.

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

InfluxDB - Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale
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SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews
SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives
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  • ledger

    Double-entry accounting system with a command-line reporting interface

  • It seems like plain text has made a comeback among the generation that remembers Notepad and vim. I've been putting together a collection of plain text applications:

    plain text todo / notes combination [https://jeffhuang.com/productivity_text_file/]

    plain text accounting [https://github.com/ledger/ledger]

    plain text academic publishing [http://www.sitzextase.de/blog/2017/02/22/plain-text/]

    plain text organizer [https://danlucraft.com/blog/2008/04/plain-text-organizer/]

    plain text daily diary [https://georgecoghill.wordpress.com/2018/01/01/the-one-line-...]

  • QOwnNotes

    QOwnNotes is a plain-text file notepad and todo-list manager with Markdown support and Nextcloud / ownCloud integration.

  • My absolute favorite hierarchical note application is CherryTree (https://www.giuspen.com/cherrytree), but there's no mobile support, and looks like there will never be.

    I migrated all my notes to QOwnnotes (https://www.qownnotes.org) synchronized with DropBox, and use any markdown editor in mobile. I would be happier if it had encryption, but even if it had, a compatible mobile editor would be hard to find.

  • InfluxDB

    Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

    InfluxDB logo
  • CherryTree

    cherrytree

  • My absolute favorite hierarchical note application is CherryTree (https://www.giuspen.com/cherrytree), but there's no mobile support, and looks like there will never be.

    I migrated all my notes to QOwnnotes (https://www.qownnotes.org) synchronized with DropBox, and use any markdown editor in mobile. I would be happier if it had encryption, but even if it had, a compatible mobile editor would be hard to find.

  • foam

    A personal knowledge management and sharing system for VSCode

  • I love plain text for my digital note-taking and I use a Foam [1] workspace now, but I've always struggled with diagrams. I love pencil and paper because I have complete freedom to draw diagrams which can be incredibly useful. I'd love a note-taking application for Android which lets me write text and then add a 'canvas block' to draw, and then switch back to text.

    [1] https://foambubble.github.io/

  • zk

  • Wrote my own vaguely Zettelkasten-inspired system because I wanted something that works at the command line and followed my own idiosyncratic (or idiotic) preferences. The data lives in my keybase KBFS mount and I symlink it into my home directory.

    You build up a hierarchy of notes, but you can also cross-link so a note appears in multiple places. You can also drop arbitrary files alongside any given note. I expand it occasionally as I need new features; most recently I added regular expression searching and a command to locate "orphaned" notes. It's at https://github.com/floren/zk which contains the Go library to interact with the files on disk, and a command-line tool which wraps the library.

  • orgmode

    Orgmode clone written in Lua for Neovim 0.9+.

  • I saw this new Org mode port for NeoVim[1].

    I wouldn't expect this to be anywhere near feature complete but for an old vim hand like me it's interesting.

    I'm a big fan of VimWiki personally but I'm in awe of some of the Org-mode demos I've seen.

    1. https://github.com/kristijanhusak/orgmode.nvim

  • med

    Micro Emacs in D

  • I fixed my editor so that it recognizes URLs, and underlines them. Clicking on one brings up a browser on that site. I should have done that 20 years ago.

    No special syntax is required. It just works. I've since been adding URLs in comments all over my code, for references. It's marvelous.

    It could be extended to recognize filename.jpg and filename.mp3 to display or play those files, too. Again with no special syntax whatsoever. It just works.

    https://github.com/DigitalMars/med

  • SaaSHub

    SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives

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  • notes.sh

    Plain-text notes with IMAP synchronization

  • There is an alternative: you can use a MIME envelope to store notes. This way you’ll have a plaintext container and a way to attach files in a portable way.

    I’ve built a note taking system based on this idea: https://github.com/knazarov/notes.sh

  • hledger

    Robust, fast, intuitive plain text accounting tool with CLI, TUI and web interfaces.

  • +1 for plain text accounting. I'm using hledger^[0] to track my finances. I do use the web UI to submit information but I edit the plain text store extensively.

    [0]: https://hledger.org/

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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