I used to end up with a lot of unsaved files and tabs in my editor filled with the content that doesn’t really have a place and wasn’t important enough to be saved separately, resulting in “Untitled - 26” tabs in Notepad++ or similar.
Examples of “might need, but possibly not” -content:
- Temporary code snippets from refactoring
- Elastic Search, Splunk etc. queries
- CLI commands
- Notes and links from debugging an error
- Removed content from a draft message, post etc.
I was implementing an autosave feature for my writing application and the app would create a temporary file with a random ID as it’s name to store the user’s contents to it. At some point the idea of saving the contents to a non-temporary file quickly and easily with a hotkey came up and after trying it out, it was great.
The regular notes and docs still have their place in Git, Confluence, FSNotes and so on, but this is for all the other miscellanouse content that doesn’t exactly fit the “requirements” for those and prevents the unsaved untitled mess from forming in the first place.
Examples of the files saved by the editor:
2023-09-04_1711_a1fdbaad7b3b4051aefa32d6174aeca5.txt
2023-09-04_1947_350fc3a10e9a4aad99a639da6013fefd.txt
2023-09-05_0759_990ebf94c17f4acc8e92437b0b4b4014.txt
2023-09-05_0915_bb66a78e6bcf41bc9d732ea6a992b42a.txt
2023-09-05_1102_18f8fb4c0f824ef29f8cb40eb9753f10.txt
2023-09-05_1210_84978fb7697140fd8e898b1db5528f80.txt
2023-09-05_1241_cd12d7cc3dc14303be3ef8a1e3afa953.txt
2023-09-05_1510_d9f932093b674d95b3cfae5740c75e60.txt
2023-09-05_2047_613a9a6f74644851b8b290a6472379aa.txt
2023-09-05_2113_4f247b98280e4bb9b3fe00878ba3c3da.txt
2023-09-05_2113_78bb5af19b1b49d590999c3b5709844f.txt
2023-09-05_2113_c0a505f548be454d8b707ca817e11f71.txt
2023-09-05_2120_4bba4d48bd6c41aa85d594da16286c56.txt
Are the file names descriptive? No, but the contents can be easily browsed and searched if needed. The point for not saving any of these notes could be made, but the one time you actually might need them and not having them would be annoying and upsetting. The storage consumed by these notes is not an issue.
How do you store and write your notes? Would be interesting to hear! You can message me on Mastodon @joonikko@mastodon.social, LinkedIn or email