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

I've been noticing lately, at least for myself, that useful technology stopped happening like 10-20 years ago. If all you could use was tech from 2000 and before you would have a pretty stable stack that just worked (without a monthly subscription.)

There is also this article today: https://jon.recoil.org/blog/2025/12/an-svg-is-all-you-need.h... about how great good ol' svg is. And then every recurring article about using RSS instead of all the other siloed products.

textfiles, makefiles, perl, php, rss, text based email, news groups, irc, icq, vim/emacs, sed, awk; all better than the crap they have spawned that is supposed to be "better".

Out of curiosity, what technology in the past 5 years do you use that you actually find better than something from 20 years ago?

I'd say Obsidian (just over five years old, since its first release), which is ironic because it's basically just a UI on top of text files.

I'd definitely agree with you on that one. Also notice how the company doesn't push monthly subscriptions on people and just lets their program exist out there.

Surely there are some!

I think AI is the obvious one. Also, VSCode (or whatever modern IDE you use) is definitely better than the IDEs that existed 20 years ago. LSP is fantastic. Hm... StackOverflow was definitely a step change over existing tools. Godot is really good, much better than anything that came before, IMO. Modern languages are pretty good these days - Rust and TypeScript are better than languages in the 2000s, to name two of the top of my head.

But it's not, it's a database. That is annoyingøy hard to move around and version control

No media other than plain text can come even close to the quantity and quality of tooling we have for it. Plain text is amazing to read, edit, share, version, tts, print and all of it with nearly maximum space efficientcy.

Sqlite is better now than 20 years ago. Java is better now than Java 20 years ago. Linux init systems are better. Virtualization, containeristion etc are better.

Actually I'll go against the grain here in saying this but I do find LLMs quite useful for a number of tasks. However you won't find an argument that the first two decades of the 21st century were mostly a waste of time in terms of what was built and how little the envelope got pushed outside machine learning. As an old backend developer I find the rise and fall of the nosql mania particularly infuriating.

Quite honestly if you put ai aside and just look at VsCode and typescript which is a common drug of choice these days the Java plus Eclipse of 20 years ago was the superior toolkit. At least semantic search and refactoring worked reliably.

Logseq for me. Its just so powerful, the infinite nesting and draggable indents and zooming

> all you could use was tech from 2000 and before you would have a pretty stable stack that just worked

The improvements made during the late 2000s and 2010s mostly had to do with making the functionality of these technologies accessible to non-technical users. I was younger and probably more mentally agile back then, but I remember the first iTouch I ever bought being very intuitive to use; you could usually intimate what you wanted to do without even looking it up. I got so accustomed to this intuitiveness (Windows Vista being an unhappy interruption in those series of memories) that by the time Windows 8 rolled around I was completely taken aback by how bad it was.

I mentioned in another comment that these productivity apps only really see a positive net expected value at the enterprise level, where they aren’t primarily used for efficiency but as coordination mechanisms and institutional memory. Individual users can only really hope to take advantage of them if they are intuitive to use.

From what I’ve observed, most of these UX failures are not the result of a lack of technical aptitude, nor an issue of cost, but of failures in institutional coordination (principal-agent problems and things like that) or the market simply being cornered; both follow the general trend of consolidation in the tech industry. The companies that are making most of our software are huge and they lack the competition to incentivize them to improve.

I hear you, but there are true moments of progress.

Vue is a huge improvement over jQuery, is the first one that roughly hit your timeframe.

I don't think it's better than org-mode, but org-mode is also post-2000 so doesn't count here. Obsidian isn't open source, isn't plain text enough, and is slow.

Markdown also falls outside the pre-2000 window as well. But, it's closely based on email and news conventions.

What’s an iTouch?

Eclipse was great for java specifically, but a lot of its useful/reliable features came from java being easy to standardize around. Strong static typing and javadocs combined allow for a lot of convenient and reliable features like previews, intellisense, refactoring, etc. For me, vscode feeling worse come from the fact that I'm using it for python and javascript which are inherently harder to design IDE features for, and also vscode is designed to be a good all-round programming editor, not a java-specific editor.

Taking its broader scope into account, I feel like vscode is a significantly better IDE than eclipse, though if I went back to exclusively coding in java and nothing else ever, I might switch back to it.

I backup my Obsidian vault weekly by blindly committing the stuff in `.obsidian` and then reviewing the changes to the `.md` files themselves. It's not version control, per se, but at least a backup and record.

iTouch was a common nickname for the iPod Touch[0]. It was essentially an iPhone without a cellular connection.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod_Touch

- Uv for Python

- Nix

- Performant Virtualization

- Ghostty

- DuckDB and, in general, performant OLAP

Don't get me wrong as I do feel the core of your thesis is correct. Emacs is my editor and I just finished writing a nicely recursive set of gMake for cloud a pipeline. Most of my core software tools haven't changed appreciably since the mid 2000s--right around the time git came out.

edit: I had no idea Nix was so old. I guess it just feels very "new" in my zeitgeist.

> what technology in the past 5 years do you use [...]

I don't use any software made in the past 5 years.

I think software has improved in the last 20 years.

  - Linux container runtimes
  - Linux hardware support
  - NixOS (19.5 years old!)

My terminal has more colors. My browser got slower.

My vi became vim became neovim. The keybindings are almost the same, but they adapt to newer virtual terminals.

As a programmer, my ability to express myself has got more nuanced. Programming languages have got better.

But the software itself doesn't seem to be better. Everything still depends on C, and the older programs live the longest.

I feel like most things I use existed 5 years ago, but now they are just better versions of what they were 5 years ago. TypeScript, Rust, JetBrains IDEs, Firefox, Slack, iTerm2, Sublime Text, Apple iMessages.

Oh I know what an iPod touch is but I never saw that nickname anywhere.

For me:

- Obsidian notes with self hosted livesync

- VR <3

- 3D Printing

Probably a lot more that i can't think of right now. What I hate it cloud subscription services though

It's what the kids called it growing up in the aughts

What do you mean by "isn't plain text enough"? I haven't used it, but the only thing I imagine would be indexing with a database, but you can just use plain text tools like grep (or rg) to fill the gaps.

What do you use VR for? If gaming, what games?

Yep, I have a cron that does git add . && git commit -m “daily commit”. Haven’t touched it in a couple years.

Not to be the “ai” guy, but LLMs have helped me explore areas of human knowledge that I had postponed otherwise

I am of the age where the internet was pivotal to my education, but the teacher’s still said “don’t trust Wikipedia”

Said another way: I grew up on Google

I think many of us take free access to information for granted

With LLMs, we’ve essentially compressed humanity’s knowledge into a magic mirror

Depending on what you present to the mirror, you get some recombined reflection of the training set out

Is it perfect? No. Does it hallucinate? Yes. It it useful? Extremely.

As a kid that often struggled with questions he didn’t have the words for, Google was my salvation

It allowed me to search with words I did know, to learn about words I didn’t know

These new words both had answer and opened new questions

LLMs are like Google, but you can ask your exact question (and another)

Are they perfect? No.

The benefit of having expertise in some area, means I can see the limits of the technology.

LLMs are not great for novelty, and sometimes struggle with the state of the art (necessarily so).

Their biggest issue is when you walk blindly, LLMs will happily lead the unknowing junior astray.

But so will a blogpost about a new language, a new TS package with a bunch of stars on GitHub, or a new runtime that “simplifies devops”

The biggest tech from the last five years is undoubtedly the magic mirror

Whether it can evolve to Strong AI or not is yet to be seen (and I think unlikely!)

I installed some old Debian versions in virtual machines recently, and had a similar thought. Other than security upgrades really 99% of anything useful was already included ~25 years ago. Could probably go back quite a bit further. One annoying thing beyond ~20 years is going back to pre-UTF-8 and having to worry about 8-bit (sometimes 7-bit) character encodings, but that is the only obvious downside. Emacs versions around version 20 also were lacking things that I use today, but nothing that I could not learn to live without.

And you can install everything. As in, you can download (from their archive) the distribution ISOs from old Debian releases. For early version everything fits on a single DVD or single CD-ROM. That is thousands of libraries and applications. You don't have to think about disk space (or RAM) when installing things from there in 2025. Also everything runs very fast.

It's like hardware has finally caught up. The level of bloat from ~2000 is perfect for 2025, especially if you want to be able to set up and run virtual machines without worrying about resource use. For offline use running applications in virtual machines it is perfect.

WSL2, Neovim, LSPs, Brave Browser, fzf, yt-dlp - just the ones I've used today.

>>makefiles

They are hard to debug and I never could make the compilation as fast as with CMake (which sucks for many other reasons). Hopefully Zig build system will make both obsolete in the near future.

In which ways is ghostty superior to other common terminal emulators?

> I've been noticing lately, at least for myself, that useful technology stopped happening like 10-20 years ago. If all you could use was tech from 2000 and before you would have a pretty stable stack that just worked

That's a very romanticized view. 2000s tech is of course not useless, it was a good plateau of quality and diversity of abilities, very foundational if you want to phrase it that way. But we've seen many evolutions and smaller revolutions since then, many improvements which are making everything significant better, easier, faster.

> textfiles, makefiles, perl, php, rss, text based email, news groups, irc, icq, vim/emacs, sed, awk; all better than the crap they have spawned that is supposed to be "better".

That's a very small, focused selection of technologies. Most of them are nearly dead or have evolved several steps since then for a reason.

> Out of curiosity, what technology in the past 5 years do you use that you actually find better than something from 20 years ago?

The liberty of the whole Webstack today is already very awesome. It allows building personalized complex applications on a high level with very little effort. Not to forgotten all the apps which are allowing Add-ons now. Firefox, VS Code or Obsidian today are blowing everything away we had 25 years in terms of ability and customizability for most people, and yes, that includes Emacs even today. I know tech-people often don't understand this, but interfaces and simplicity matters for a lot of cases and people.

But if we are talking about my personal favourites, it would be apps like rofi, fzf and tilling-WMs like AwesomeWM and QTile. The amount of benefit I get from a simple fuzzy-selector and a simple shell- or python-script is insane. I don't think that was available in 2000. Similar topic would be Unicode and icon-fonts. Very small scalled improvements, but very deep benefit for everyone not living in the US-bubble. Language-situation in 2000 was awful.

Sqlite and permanently evolving Postgres are also great benefits. Python3 is very awesome, Rust and Go are really beneficial in terms of speed and security. Comparing all this with the security-nightmares of the 2000s is insane. Though, to be fair, security 25 years ago wasn't as bad as 20 or 15 years ago IIRC, because it was still escalating at the time.

And let's not talk about genre-software...I'm pretty sure even trash like Adobes products have today more useful abilities than they had 25 years ago, it's just the other situation which has become worse. But then again, we have now many more good software like Gimp, Blender, who knows what (I'm not in creative software)...

> I don't think it's better than org-mode

In theory, it's significant better than org-mode, because Electron has much more abilities than Emacs. In reality, it's a matter of taste and personal requirements. Obsidian is customizable, so you make it do whatever you want, and there are many addons available; but org-mode has also a very specific focus on the type of addons being available and builtin stuff it has, were Obsidian is more lacking I would say.

> Obsidian isn't open source, isn't plain text enough, and is slow.

It's very fast for what it offers. And "plain text enough" is again a matter of taste. It's all plaintext, but delivering a useful and very powerful interface on top of it. The kind of area where Emacs is lacking.

That's pretty far from the truth though.

It is absolutely inferior to a database-like binary format for querying, sorting, searching etc. It's a good tool for certain jobs.

> My browser got slower

Is it the browser, or the websites getting more and more resource-intensive as hardware (and also browser optimizations) got better and more powerful?