My productivity app is a never-ending .txt file (2020)

Gonna be honest, my productivity app once upon a time was unsaved sublime text documents

Scratch files in jetbrains ides also!

My productivity app is a sketchbook and a pencil, if anyone knows what those are.

For me it often still is.. at least when I'm working alone on something / no collaboration needed. Every time I try something else I revert back to this, although sometimes I do save the files, eventually.

Mine is the same, but unsaved files in Notepad++

You mean it hasn’t been that way for the last 14 years and it hasn’t survived 5 different computer changes and a dozen or so OS migrations and you don’t still have a tiny document with “fun business ideas” to start that company with your fresh out of college gang right next to that “how to organize a great 10 year reunion” sheet from 3 years ago?

Must be a me thing, then.

TextMate here. Unsaved ofc.

For me it was a ream of printer paper and a mug full of random writing implements.

IMO the platform is unmatched at rapid on-demand WYSIWYG visualization.

Not so great for a productivity app, though. Too easy to lose important information when it's on the same sheet of paper as a drawing of a graph algorithm that turned out to be wrong, and trying to remember whether x cross y positive implies x right or left of y.

This is still my way of doing things!!

What have you moved on to?

My productivity app at work was Notepad++

I have seen colleagues using an almost append only txt file with notepad.exe. It worked for them I guess, but there were some features I could not live without on Notepad++

I bet you could rig up a webcam, hook it up to a multimodal LLM, that can then instantly scan, sort, and archive all of the separate ideas on each sheet.

That would make it easier to not lose information, but I don't think it makes it any easier of a productivity app.