Two years of plain-text notes

Between 2019 and 2024 I moved my notes between five different apps. Each migration lost something: attachments, links between notes, or just the dates. Two years ago I gave up and put everything into a folder of Markdown files. It has been the most stable setup I have had.

The layout

notes/
  inbox.md
  journal/2026-06.md
  projects/
  howto/
  people.md

New things go to inbox.md. Once a week I move them somewhere sensible or delete them. Journal files are one per month, which keeps them small enough to scroll.

Search

Search is grep -ri, or rg when I remember it is installed. It finds everything in well under a second, and it will keep working when every app I used before is gone.

Sync

The folder is a git repository pushed to the home server. On the phone I use a simple editor that opens a synced folder. Conflicts happen maybe twice a year and are easy to fix by hand, because it is just text.

The best note system is the one you still trust in five years.

What I miss

Images inline, sometimes. Tables are clumsy. But I would rather have slightly ugly notes I can read forever than pretty ones locked inside a format I do not control.