| I maintain a set of text files some of which I refer to many times hourly to either read or write to here are the more frequently used text files - work specific
- software specific
- general todo with daily entries
- general purpose knowledge
- vacation related with top tips per country
- nyc specific within some of these files are top level categories with subentries I have search tooling to probe the files ... sometime as simple as cat file | egrep --color=auto -B20 -A20 'some string' which will color highlight matches and show surrounding lines from the file I find note keeping a critical skill everyone should adopt to varying extents ... my main software note file contains over 90,000 lines of text so is the keystone to my approach ( yes that's over 1600 pages ) ... as the complexity of my note keeping expanded so did my ability to organically do local searches so I am not in want of any outside tools ... all I use is vi and various flavors of grep additionally I have a few directories with subdirs which are either project or topic or tool specific having organizational skills when working on complex research projects which span months or years pays back in spades and note keeping is just one aspect |