Universal Digital Notetaking Format

2022-09-25

In this post, I will be describing the notetaking format I've settled for after a year of writing posts to this website.

First of all, here are the guiding principles:

Plain-text-oriented: I want my notes to be platform-independent and for them to not be reliant on any proprietary format.
Simple-as-possible: If the system gets in the way, I won't be using it as much. Strive for simplicity.
Searchable: A system that relies on manual organization takes a lot of effort to work right. Leveraging search gets the same result (being able to find and retrieve what you are looking for) with a fraction of the effort.

How it is implemented in a higher level:

A single directory with a collection of plain-text files with UTF8 encoding.
git for version-control and backing up to a remote machine.
grep for searching within the body of notes.
vim as the text editor (or VS Code, if I feel the need).

The simple trick, though, is how the notes are written:

The file name of the note starts with the ISO date of when it was created. For example, this file is named 2022-09-25_universal_notes.md.
The first line of the text file the title of the note. This allows head -1 to reliably get the titles of any of the notes (or of all the notes of the whole directory).
The second line of the text file is the date when the note was creating in ISO format “YYYY-MM-DD”. (Note: I'm experimenting with adding the dates when I modified the note in this same line, separating each with a space.)
The third line of the text file are the tags I want to attach to the note to be able to find it later. Each tag starts with a “#” and does not contain spaces. A single space separates multiple tags in this same line.
Two consecutive empty lines separate this initial metadata about the note of the contents of the note itself.

Putting it all together, it might look something like this:

Universal Digital Notetaking Format
2022-09-25
#post #git #grep #vim #plain-text #notetaking #notes #text

In this posts, I will be describing [... the contents which you're reading now ...]

This organization pattern allows me to do the following flows:

ls will list all notes in chronological order with regards to their creation date.
grep -R '#tag' will list all the notes which match a particular tag.