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Comment by jxy | Hacker News Reader

People thinking pen and paper is simple have intentionally made it simple. Have you considered how many different kinds of paper/notebooks/slides/cards, kinds of pen/pencil/brush? Soon you'll start fiddling with your pens and papers, as some comments here have already started suggesting their personal favorite, including making your custom "eye dropper" pen.

Taking the same approach to pen and paper, digital interface is extremely simple, a keyboard and a display. Your system: text files. It's liberating. You open your note.txt,

  ed note.txt
  ,
  my previous notes
  more notes
  ...
  my last notes
  a
  now just write you new notes down
  don't worry about anything
  don't even worry about editing previous lines
  just write
  and done
  .
  w
  q

And that's it.

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> People thinking pen and paper is simple have intentionally made it simple.

> Taking the same approach to pen and paper, digital interface is extremely simple, a keyboard and a display. Your system: text files. It's liberating. You open your note.txt, <ed session snipped> And that's it.

Surely that's also intentionally making a digital interface simple? I mean, both kinds—all kinds—of interfaces can be made simpler or made more complex depending on the user's tastes. That fact itself doesn't, I think, speak to any virtue or lack thereof on the part of any interface paradigm.

Line editors for the win.

cat > note.txt <<EOF

…

EOF

   cat > note.txt <<EOF

cat >> notes.txt <<EOF

Yes. If we also add

    date >> notes.txt

it would be a great immutable ledger .

Yeah, I was actually thinking of that too -- and how they should both be rolled up into an alias, for single-command dated notetaking. Dunno if that would work, though: What's the syntax for adding the "EOF" bit after what you type after invoking it?

  $ alias dn='date >> notes.txt && cat >> notes.txt <<EOF'
  $ dn
  > Reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32507878
  >   alias dn='date >> notes.txt && cat >> notes.txt <<EOF'
  > EOF
  $ cat notes.txt 
  Thu 18 Aug 2022 01:41:18 PM UTC
  Reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32507878
    alias dn='date >> notes.txt && cat >> notes.txt <<EOF'

Yeah, but you had to type "EOF" to get out of the "cat >>" sub-process, didn't you? There's probably no way to automate / hide that away... (?) Sure, it's pretty good the way it is already, but it bugs me that you have to type that bit that isn't what you want to note. (Who, me? What OCD?)

The essence of this tiny "interactive command line utility" is to capture user key strokes and redirect to a sub-process. So there gotta be a way to interrupt and exit the sub-process. "EOF" is just a convention. You can also get out of the sub-process with "Ctrl-D" like in Python shell.

Interactive editors like vi/emacs also need to flush the buffer and save the content to the file, but you have to type something, such as ":w" and "C-x C-s" (or use GUI).

If you want full automation without human input, I/O redirection is the way.

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