<story><title>Keeping a plaintext “did” file</title><url>http://theptrk.com/2018/07/11/did-txt-file/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ajuc</author><text>Similar but not the same: most days day at work I create one or more txt files in notepad (kate to be exact) where I paste every temporary info while I work on some task. Basically everything that doesn&amp;#x27;t go to git, and you have to keep somewhere while you&amp;#x27;re working on it:&lt;p&gt;- nonobvious terminal commands or small scripts I had to write&lt;p&gt;- fixes for enviromental&amp;#x2F;configuration problems&lt;p&gt;- fragments of stacktraces&lt;p&gt;- fragments of log files&lt;p&gt;- packages that needed to be installed&lt;p&gt;- short todo lists I created while doing sth&lt;p&gt;- links to webpages I found that had a solution to my problem&lt;p&gt;- profiling results for solutions I compared&lt;p&gt;- parts of emails I copied to focus on the important fragments with stuff to check&amp;#x2F;fix&lt;p&gt;- names of temporary branches created when working on the problem&lt;p&gt;- xml fragments from some requests I copypasted to kate to prettify it&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s no structure and no plain English descriptions in these files, just bunch of copypasted stuff separated by a few empty lines in a text file.&lt;p&gt;I have to keep these things somewhere anyway while I work on them, and pasting them in one file that I later save in one directory preserves them for future. I call the file yyyymmdd_some_keywords.txt.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t bother to describe the task in plain English, the stuff that&amp;#x27;s copypasted there is enough for context, I can also check git from same date if something&amp;#x27;s not clear. The most important thing is - there&amp;#x27;s no overhead, just open the file when starting a new task, keep it opened while you work on sth and save it when you finish. So I have hundreds of these files after a while, and when I encounter some problem I can quickly grep to check if I seen similar stacktrace before and what it was about.&lt;p&gt;Before I started doing this I had several instances of déjà vu - I could swear I&amp;#x27;ve seen this problem before but can&amp;#x27;t remember what it was about and how it was solved.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>idiomatic1</author><text>Vimwiki diary, `\\w` to go to today&amp;#x27;s file, and even get syntax highlighting blocks for anything vim knows about.</text></comment>
<story><title>Keeping a plaintext “did” file</title><url>http://theptrk.com/2018/07/11/did-txt-file/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ajuc</author><text>Similar but not the same: most days day at work I create one or more txt files in notepad (kate to be exact) where I paste every temporary info while I work on some task. Basically everything that doesn&amp;#x27;t go to git, and you have to keep somewhere while you&amp;#x27;re working on it:&lt;p&gt;- nonobvious terminal commands or small scripts I had to write&lt;p&gt;- fixes for enviromental&amp;#x2F;configuration problems&lt;p&gt;- fragments of stacktraces&lt;p&gt;- fragments of log files&lt;p&gt;- packages that needed to be installed&lt;p&gt;- short todo lists I created while doing sth&lt;p&gt;- links to webpages I found that had a solution to my problem&lt;p&gt;- profiling results for solutions I compared&lt;p&gt;- parts of emails I copied to focus on the important fragments with stuff to check&amp;#x2F;fix&lt;p&gt;- names of temporary branches created when working on the problem&lt;p&gt;- xml fragments from some requests I copypasted to kate to prettify it&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s no structure and no plain English descriptions in these files, just bunch of copypasted stuff separated by a few empty lines in a text file.&lt;p&gt;I have to keep these things somewhere anyway while I work on them, and pasting them in one file that I later save in one directory preserves them for future. I call the file yyyymmdd_some_keywords.txt.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t bother to describe the task in plain English, the stuff that&amp;#x27;s copypasted there is enough for context, I can also check git from same date if something&amp;#x27;s not clear. The most important thing is - there&amp;#x27;s no overhead, just open the file when starting a new task, keep it opened while you work on sth and save it when you finish. So I have hundreds of these files after a while, and when I encounter some problem I can quickly grep to check if I seen similar stacktrace before and what it was about.&lt;p&gt;Before I started doing this I had several instances of déjà vu - I could swear I&amp;#x27;ve seen this problem before but can&amp;#x27;t remember what it was about and how it was solved.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>TheSpiceIsLife</author><text>If it&amp;#x27;s appropriate, would it be easier to use a clipboard enhancer that writes everything you copy to a file?&lt;p&gt;I use ClipX at work (Windows), fairly sure it has a logging feature, and I think it can be told not to record from password fields; and Flycut at home (Mac) but Flycut doesn&amp;#x27;t seem to have logging.</text></comment>