[weaksauce]

Just one file?

I have a man page repository that is just a simple folder that gets tab completion (basically ls fed into the complete function). aliased to `mm` as in myman(pages). that gets opened up into emacs though so it's basically a repository of files that you can grep through.

Care to share your emacs/shell setup for what you are doing?

[bmalehorn]

I have a similar setup to GP: Emacs + one file + an "new-day" command.

Everything goes in one big "scratch.txt" file, with headers like:

    ###### Saturday, May 20 2017

...at the start of each day. These are generated by a function I run every day:

    (defun new-day ()
      (interactive)
      (insert (format-time-string "###### %A, %B %d %Y\n")))

"scratch.txt" is always an open buffer in Emacs. You can search through the file with isearch, helm, or whatever you use. I use the "desktop" library to save and restore all open files when I close Emacs.

That's really it, just one big unstructured text file.

I don't put a lot of prose in this diary. Only todo items, code snippets, and errors / log output.

Our setups have slightly different goals: yours is to create daily nuggets of documentation, while mine is to archive whatever thoughts and code were running through my head each day.

[weaksauce]

Thanks for that... I have an ideas file in my man pages that is an org file. I might do something similar to this as well for just daily thoughts. The man pages have been invaluable for long running notes that are infrequently accessed or thought about.

[kabdib]

Just one file, backed up regularly. I think the simple is key; one of the sibling replies here has a bit of lisp similar to what I use, and that's it.

The problem with applying a bunch of structure is that you start to screw with the structure, maybe try to turn things into JSON or whatever, pivot by date or technology or location, and a few hours later you've wasted a bunch of time mucking with stuff that you'll probably waste more time mucking with later. Just slamming text into a file and having a minimal syntax for dating things is, I've found, sufficient. I want notes and a little support for continuity ("what the heck was I juggling when I left on Friday?"), not a blog or a platform for deathless prose.

It'd be nice if there was a rich text system similar to Emacs that didn't force you do write markup or handcuff you to a proprietary data format. Truthfully I haven't looked that hard (multi-platform is probably difficult to achieve). I have notes files strung back over twenty years, and simple text is a hard habit to break.