Hello all. I’m looking for (a) program(s) to manage & document things in life. Mainly these features are what I need:

  • Diary, random notes(like a wiki?) with version control
  • TODO list, auto added to diary at that time period
  • Ability to attach images and text files to those diary, notes
  • Calendar with schedule synced with TODO
  • Easy backup, preferably in plaintext or simple db
  • Text search

Currently I’m using SeaMonkey and my phone(android) to manage calendar (so two separated ones), a paper note to write diaries and use dokuwiki for random notes. This setup is too complicated and isn’t productive at all.

I do think my requirements are kinda abstract, and there most likely isn’t a single program that can do all this. Although basic I’m a novice FreeBSD & Emacs+evil user so *nix-only or text-based utilities are okay. I’m not aware of any program that meets these needs, is there anything that resembles what I’m thinking? Thanks!

  • hexagonwin@lemmy.sdf.orgOP
    0·
    3 months ago

    I’ve been using Emacs org-mode a bit lately and it seems overall similar to markdown. Obsidian below also seems to be a markdown thing…

    What do you personally use for organizing things with markdown?

    • MajorHavoc@programming.dev
      0·
      3 months ago

      Nice! I understand org mode is fantastic, and more feature complete than todo.txt.

      Obsidian was too web-based, for me, but I’ve heard good things.

      I’ve configured my text editor (VSCodium), to add files to a folder called Journal in my home directory.

      Every note file gets named with a two digit prefix for the current month. So currently, 07-[name of note].md. If I create the same note twice in the same month, my setup opens the existing note file. Sometimes I’ll have a couple of months 05-foo.md, 06-foo.md that match. Sometimes I’ll copy/paste to merge them, sometimes I’ll leave it.

      Every nine months or so, I scoop all the files into a separate backup folder named after the current year. This helps my full text searches focus on more recent notes, by default.

      When I need to send someone my notes, all formal-like, I’ll use md2html and then an HTML to PDF converter.

      I periodically sync my ~/Journal folder to my home Network Attached Storage, which, itself, later backs up to a private AWS S3 bucket.

      Edit: Since you asked about version contol elsewhere. I used to religiously version control with git, but lately I’ve found that the version history provided by my NAS is enough.

      • hexagonwin@lemmy.sdf.orgOP
        0·
        3 months ago

        Cool setup you got there! I just tried Obsidian and some of its features are great but I have to admit it’s too web-based for me. That file naming scheme seems quite good, I’ll take that in mind. What NAS do you use that also handles version controlling by itself? It’s a bit tedious to do a git commit every time after editing something so I was considering automating it but that wouldn’t be so easy to access later.