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by maicro 638 days ago
You might like Notion, Obsidian or similar note taking apps - using it as basically a stream-of-consciousness tool, recording what you've tested, those notes you mentioned, but also being able to embed code, screenshots, etc. _all in-line_ really helps with the context reacquisition. Just lookup the shortcut to insert the current datetime (Evernote was "ctrl+;", Notion I think the best is probably "@now") and you've got good timestamps as well.

I'm not super familiar with Obsidian, but from your general description I think it might work best - I _think_ you can just have your (markdown?) Obsidian file in the project folder like you mentioned.
1 comments
mrngm 633 days ago
I'm aware of various information management tools, but exploring these tools, getting familiar with specific syntax or intricacies of usage needs a higher activation energy than simply running $EDITOR and typing away.

I'm usually working on hardware that's at least a couple of years old, and the experience with modern day desktop applications (websites in an Electron-wrapper, if you will) is that they're terribly slow on relatively okay, albeit older, hardware. Not to mention (but I haven't checked!) that you'll need the application to search through your content, perhaps due to the use of some database, instead of grep(1)ing for keywords inside text files. I'm not opposed to optimized, application-specific search, but, for personal usage, if I need the application to search through content, this makes data portability much more difficult.

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maicro 631 days ago
Absolutely all valid points.

I will say (because you specifically pointed out you haven't checked - I do enjoy clear and honest communication online) that Obsidian at least deals with straight Markdown files, so while (per my current understanding) the program itself isn't OSS, the datafiles are all easily importable into other systems, and the files themselves are grep-able and mostly human readable (all text is there, but extra features and layout will not show up as nicely as in a Markdown-specific renderer) in any text editor.

Have a good day X)

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