I started keeping notes in plain text in 2015. A decade and several thousand files later, here's what survived.

What still works#

Markdown files in a flat folder, with a date prefix in the filename. I tried hierarchies. Hierarchies always die. The flat folder with 2024-08-13-some-note.md filenames is the one organizational scheme I have never regretted.

One folder for active notes, one for archive. Once a quarter I move things that haven't been touched in 6+ months to archive/. They're still searchable; they just don't clutter.

Wikilinks ([[like this]]) for internal references. The square brackets are the right syntax — visually distinct from regular markdown links, easy to grep for, neutral about the link target's exact filename.

grep and ripgrep for search. I've tried every "second brain" search interface. None of them beat rg "thing I'm looking for" ~/notes for raw speed and no-surprises behavior.

What I gave up on#

• Tags. I added them for years. I have used them twice. The second time was to make a point about how I never use them. They were a category error: I was trying to compress relationships into a single dimension.
• Daily notes. Mine became a low-grade journaling habit that produced nothing reusable. Other people swear by them; I am not other people.
• Sync apps. Every sync app is great until the sync conflict. Now I just commit to a private git repo. Conflicts surface as merge conflicts, which I know how to handle.
• Note IDs / Zettelkasten numbers. A genuine attempt for two years. Real Zettelkasten does this for a reason. My version was cargo-culting.

What I'd recommend now#

• Plain markdown files. Any directory. Any editor.
• A flat folder with date prefixes.
• One archive folder that you sweep into quarterly.
• [[wikilinks]] for cross-references — even if your editor doesn't render them, they grep cleanly.
• Git for backup, not for sync. Sync over Dropbox/iCloud/Syncthing.
• A single text editor you don't customize obsessively.

The thing nobody tells you#

The notes are not the point. The point is the act of writing them, repeatedly, for a long time, about things you care about. The medium gets out of the way. Plain text gets out of the way better than anything else.

I went through the whole tooling cycle. I'm back here, with the same files I had in 2015, in the same format, in the same flat folder. The ones from 2015 still open. That's the test.

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