Three years of notes in plain text

What survived, and what I quietly stopped doing.

Three years ago I moved every note I keep into a folder of Markdown files. No app, no database, no sync service that could get acquired. Here’s the honest accounting.

What survived

• One folder, flat. Subfolders were a filing system I spent more time maintaining than using.
• Daily files, YYYY-MM-DD.md. Everything goes in the day it happened. Structure emerges later or not at all.
• Links by filename. [[some-note]] resolved by a ten-line script. Good enough.

What I stopped doing

• Tags. I added them for two years and searched them zero times.
• Templates. They made starting a note feel like paperwork.
• A grand index. grep is the index.

The system is boring now, which is the point. Boring things last.