Notetime: Minimalistic notes where everything is timestamped

Re:Notetime: Minimalistic notes where everything is timestamped by PaulRobinson on Friday March 21, 2025 @09:43AM (#43435611)

I like the idea, but not the web-based implementation. Local first, and ideally an open source app that can work offline when I'm going distraction free.

It feels like a vim plugin. It definitely feels like org-mode can do this.

A few years back I had a little command line tool where I could log things quickly - it was like syslog for humans - but with #hashtags for projects or clients, and then a small tool that would work out how long I'd spent on different things. It required me to write a log every time I finished a task or a pomodoro. I might resurrect that, but having an open file has been cute for me for quite a while, and then I can go back and copy/paste what I need to draft docs and so on.

I do think "note taking" as an app is actually under-served. There's lots of wiki plugins, org-mode, tons of "productivity tools", but actually a single app that lets you just write, then helps you with review (and timestamps, contexts and so on are essential to that), and then figure out actions/todos and gives you seamless interaction with those, and integration with 3rd-party tools (I don't want to copy and paste between vim/emacs/JIRA/asana/notion/trello/apple notes/calendar reminders/outlook tasks/whatever), would be very, very neat.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Notetime: Minimalistic notes where everything is timestamped by Propelloni on Friday March 21, 2025 @11:03AM (#43436544)

I do this with Zim (desktop wiki).

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Notetime: Minimalistic notes where everything is timestamped by wooptoo on Friday March 21, 2025 @05:25PM (#43440966)

Fellow Zim user here. Is there a way to add time stamps to each line in Zim like this app does?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Notetime: Minimalistic notes where everything is timestamped by Propelloni on Saturday March 22, 2025 @06:31AM (#43444795)

Yes, there is. The manual way is to press CTRL+d where you'd like a date. Or read the thread at [1] to configure Zim adds the date on Return.

[1] https://github.com/zim-desktop-wiki/zim-desktop-wiki/issues/...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Notetime: Minimalistic notes where everything is timestamped by danielbln on Friday March 21, 2025 @10:51AM (#43436414)

I'm doing this via VSCode, Cline and various services connected via MCP. Works quite well.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Notetime: Minimalistic notes where everything is timestamped by speerer on Friday March 21, 2025 @10:35AM (#43436236)

I came here to type all of these thoughts, and found you'd already expressed them (and more). Even the bit about making my own command line tool.

Agree!

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Notetime: Minimalistic notes where everything is timestamped by san_dimitri on Friday March 21, 2025 @12:02PM (#43437241)

`jrnl` commandline tool does the same with a text file. You can sync it with dropbox and use the same journal across multiple machines.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Notetime: Minimalistic notes where everything is timestamped by speerer on Friday March 21, 2025 @12:26PM (#43437618)

Nice one, thanks! Mine was for a more specific use case but this could be really helpful.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Notetime: Minimalistic notes where everything is timestamped by PaulRobinson on Monday March 24, 2025 @10:14AM (#43461368)

Thanks for the hat-tip on `jrnl` - this is a much better version of the cmd line tool I talked about in my comment above and I am now starting to use it. Great logistics being cli-based, think I'm going to be using it plenty.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Notetime: Minimalistic notes where everything is timestamped by Arch-TK on Friday March 21, 2025 @12:43PM (#43437892)

    $ ts | tee -a notes

Or just ts >>notes

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Notetime: Minimalistic notes where everything is timestamped by p32y on Saturday March 22, 2025 @12:05PM (#43446715)

on macOS, just:

echo "$(date) Do something" | tee -a notes

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Notetime: Minimalistic notes where everything is timestamped by gohberg on Friday March 21, 2025 @01:20PM (#43438462)

thanks for the feedback!

Being a developer, I'm aware that the desktop ecosystem offers a plethora of tools for this.

I think my main inspiration in this project was to combine the simplicity of apple notes with timestamped entries, being able to log notes in this form from any kind of device and having cross-device sync.

I released the local-only version so it will be useful to privacy-minded folks but I do plan to have a cross-device backup and sync option since I believe it's a very compelling feature.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Notetime: Minimalistic notes where everything is timestamped by physicles on Friday March 21, 2025 @08:31PM (#43442186)

I have a command line tool that just takes a line of input, then writes the time stamped entry to a text file, one per quarter. A cron job pops up a terminal once an hour during business hours. I use that log to prepare for performance reviews to recall what I’d worked on, and I often go back to remember details about a problem I solved months or years ago. It’s fantastic, been using it for seven years.

In 2023, I wrote another script that appends a line to a csv file every 5 minutes. The line includes the focused window class, command line, title, name of the git branch that’s currently checked out, system idle time, and WiFi access point name. So I know pretty much how long I was working on everything vs other stuff like slack.

I’m finally starting to write tools to visualize and analyze this data. Is it going to change how I work? Not really, but for some reason I like seeing at a glance how I spent my time.

[ Parent | on HN ]