After years of working... how do you keep track of your small tips and manuals of things you already done?

Kate X257

Microsoft Sticky Notes. All notes are labeled by type, quarter and year. I've tried every major note keeping tool in existence, paper trails, and even diction software, but in the end a giant bag of non-hierarchical notes which are easily searchable trumps everything in terms of both maintenance, scalability and has a low barrier-to-entry. I can search and read notes on my computer, on my phone, or any browser. There's rudimentary support for color codes and markup. There's no overall structure to maintain. What else do you need?

Chris C B

For my purposes, 'good enough'. With the front and the back scanned and OCRed, I have yet to have a search failure. If the front of the CD case is in a fancy script the results are poor, but invariably the normal lettering on the back is very accurate in most cases.

Bumchuckle

Me: "Honey, I joined a cult and didn't know it!" Lounge: "One of us, One of us, One of us..." As for the OP question: Text file in cloud storage (Dropbox) as per my Cult leader, and I bookmark any useful web pages so that I know they helped when I inevitably google the problem again (and again etc. ;-))

darktrick544

I have a subdir named Code Snippets in my Projects dir, where all my projects code resides. Every time I do something that strikes me as "something I'm going to need to do again but won't remember how I did it" gets the code snippet saved in there with an indicative title. Been doing this for my entire career (30+ years). Add to it and browse it couple times a week. Getting to the time where I'm thinking of who to pass it down to.

CosmoSpacely

I can definitely recommend mediawiki. It may be overkill for a lone developer, but for any size team it works well. It's simple enough to manage and it provides a decent search. Authoring is easy enough, just follow the cheatsheet. Our team has used it for over almost 15 years. Our corporate IT overlords have replaced it with Confluence, which sucks in comparison. Simplicity rules! Cosmo Jetson! You're Fiiiiired!

DumpsterJuice

I use "Agent ransack". At some point, no matter how hard you try to structure things, it gets a way from you. Agent Ransack is essentially a Grep Tool, that is amazingly fast. It's almost as fast as google itself. It's got a (Right mouse click) Context. My Projects vary the whole landscape of technologies, from strait up.NET projects, Documents, Angular, Documentation, notes, tips. Agent Ransack solves this problem: "I know I have this somewhere, but I forget where it is" Keep It Simple, keep it moving.

Member 9167057

That depends on the manual in question. If we're talking about the documentation of a third-party library I'm using, I put it in my repository. For tips, I don't keep track of them at all once I've implemented them in my code & understood them. If I ever need a link to give someone, I search.

Bruce Patin

I made some XSLT files and an XML TOC to point to several HTML text files in a folder. Lots of times, I wished I had a Wiki, and tested a few Wikis, upon which the domain I had the test Wikis on was hacked through a backdoor in one of the Wikis. MediaWiki is probably the safest, but is slow, and I prefer having the articles each in their own text file. Some day.

Tokinabo

totally agree! stuff in text files and [Agent Ransack] to find things back very fast.

gvidali

Jumping in only to point out that Microsoft OneNote is free and does not require any "subscription" whatsoever. True, a Microsoft account is needed - but that is all. OneNote for Windows and OneNote can be installed side by side. See here: https://i.imgur.com/pGElovQ.png[^] OneNote for Microsoft 365 can be obtained here: Download OneNote[^] Just my two cents.

Mike Hankey

I have, and use the free version, we were talking about the paid version being subscription, etc..

The less you need, the more you have. Even a blind squirrel gets a nut...occasionally. JaxCoder.com

beggsj

I've recently installed Dokuwiki on my NAS. It just stores your pages as markdown .txt files - so you can just use any text tools (editors/grep/sed whatever) on your pages if you want. The wiki interface also seems pretty minimal and very fast.

Peter Adam

From our own newsletter today: [Org mode for Emacs](https://orgmode.org/)

Member 9968683

I use an app to take notes, tree-organised, on my mobile devices. Started in 2001 with Palm, from 2003 with Windows Mobile, from 2013 with Android. In the last move seven years ago I developed my app, since I didn't find anything adequate. In the years I developed it to suit all my needs: text input facilitation (it's WYSIWYG of course), advanced search, internal links, encryption, automatic calculations including spreadsheets, image editor, tasks, progressive backups... This is the beauty of make your own app. Encrypted files are sync daily on multiple devices. Recently, reviewing it for an Android, iOS and Windows implementation refresh, I had a look at other solutions out there - including DokuWiki, OneNote and Obsidian - but I found them too cumbersome, slow and limited. My main notes files, the personal and current work notes, have about 1,600 nodes/pages each. My oldest notes are from 2001. My job is knowledge and I do not have a good memory, so...

S B

I'm surprised no one mentioned Evernote. I switch between Evernote and OneNote depending on my mood. It's a bit of a shame the free version of Evernote only allows you to sync with 2 devices as of last year, but I guess they needed to push people to buy their premium subscription. Two devices is enough for me and you can use the website based version in a pinch. Text files are fine but I really like the convenience and instant sync of cloud-based services and the feature richness of dedicated note taking software such as * image OCR * clipping excerpts from websites, * text to speech * recording voice notes of meetings and transcribing them (not very well) * being able to share notes and photos of whiteboards with co-workers In terms of how easy it is to find stuff again, it isn't the software that determines how easy this is, it more comes down to the discipline I have when capturing things to add appropriate tags to them and file them in the right notebook.

S B

I'm surprised no one mentioned Evernote. I switch between Evernote and OneNote depending on my mood. It's a bit of a shame the free version of Evernote only allows you to sync with 2 devices as of last year, but I guess they needed to push people to buy their premium subscription. Two devices is enough for me and you can use the website based version in a pinch. Text files are fine but I really like the convenience and instant sync of cloud-based services and the feature richness of dedicated note taking software such as * image OCR * clipping excerpts from websites, * text to speech * recording voice notes of meetings and transcribing them (not very well) * being able to share notes and photos of whiteboards with co-workers In terms of how easy it is to find stuff again, it isn't the software that determines how easy this is, it more comes down to the discipline I have when capturing things to add appropriate tags to them and file them in the right notebook.

pmauriks

I've done quite a few different things over the years. I started out with a **huge text file** - like a diary. Then I moved to **EverNote** (before it was cloud based). I experimented with **CherryTree** (because I need platform independence with some of my machines on Linux). Then I moved to **OneNote**@ which was a compromise, was unstable and recently became difficult to export data from (which left me worried). Now I'm back to text files using **Markdown** - and images in folders. I like this approach because: - It allows me to attach diagrams. - It's easily grep-able. - I can separate different content into folders. - Markdown allows me to view it in an attractive way and export it in neat formats for others to read. - I keep control of where the data goes. @ Work supported tool of choice - but not fit for purpose in my experience.