I love the idea of using plain text files for note taking and task tracking. As others have commented on specific tools and workflows that make this easy for them to stick with, I thought I'd add mine. I use textnote [0], which is a tool I built for exactly this workflow but is hopefully flexible enough to accommodate many of the similar processes mentioned here. It simply opens a plain text file in your terminal and provides lightweight tooling for tracking by date and rolling up previous notes into archives if desired.

Thanks for opening another great discussion of plain text note taking as a productivity tool!

[0] https://github.com/dkaslovsky/textnote

I like to recommend "Kill It With Fire" by Marianne Bellotti. It is full of insights far beyond managing legacy systems (as the subtitle would have you believe) and does a great job of analyzing the technology and the people/organizations who build it.

Thanks again for the great suggestion. I've implemented this and it is part of the latest release (v1.1.0).

I love this idea and will look into implementing it in the next few days! Thanks!

I agree! nav supports this workflow in search mode as well, and I could easily support fuzzy searching rather than exact match if that would be valuable.

Yes, fzf and ripgrep are the best! Together they are the heart of at least half of my .zshrc functions, and it would be fun to see about writing something similar by composing them together in various ways. Great idea!

Thanks! This does look like a similar tool, and as you said, I love seeing what others have done for inspiration for new features to tools I'm working on. Thanks again.

Broot looks really nice. I love the tree-like output - `tree` is one of my favorite tools. Interactive tree is a great idea, makes me wish I had perhaps started there instead.

broot can be used to replace tree (i.e. be non interactive): https://dystroy.org/broot/tricks/#replace-tree

This is convenient when you don't want to browse or search, just want what tree does but without scrolling.

I love tree, too!

Sometimes broot feels a little busy or complex to me, though. I'm interested in your tool's UI as well.

I have to admit that I had not come across midnight-commander. It certainly looks interesting and I'll be giving it a spin. Thanks for pointing me in its direction!

I do intend to expand nav's feature set to come close to an `ls` replacement, at least for the most common workflows, whereas midnight-commander and other similar tools are perhaps closer to being (or are) file managers. I'm also hopeful that by using the completely awesome Charm [0] libraries that I can make for a pleasing/modern UI. Either way, I had a blast building nav and look forward to continuing on.

Thanks again for the comment!

[0] https://github.com/charmbracelet

Midnight Commander also includes a really decent little text editor (mcedit) with syntax highlighting for a decent range of text file formats.

nnn could be another to compare against.

How about Norton Commander?

Same thing. MC was made to emulate NC. And of course there are actually countless filesystem browsers. Even xtree was probably not the first since that was on ms-dos, and I bet there were some on the 8-bit machines before that.

But this one's aim seems to be a bit specific and not simply to be a filesystem browser (file manager) but specifically to try to be an "interactive ls". IE somehow feel like ls. Though I don't know why. It doesn't seem more useful than a normal file manager. I think it's just down to a very fine point of aesthetics, which is fair enough.

You might be interested in a project I created for exactly the use case you describe - simple, text-based notes/todos managed via a CLI: https://github.com/dkaslovsky/textnote

The project received some attention on the front page of HN a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26123436

Because all notes are plaintext and stored in a single directory, it is easy to use standard tooling (such as grep) to extend the functionality. If cloud synchronization is a must-have, simply sync the directory to your provider of choice.

Thanks!

I'm looking for an Android app unfortunately, sorry :|