# My life in plain text

> How I manage todos, agenda, journal and notes in plain text files: todo.txt, custom agendatxt and expensetxt formats, Markdown, vim on desktop and the MOrg Android app.

Published October 30, 2022, updated November 8, 2022 by Benoît Hervier, freelance lead developer and software architect (https://rvier.fr/).
HTML version: https://rvier.fr/posts/my-life-in-plain-text-EN

*Update 2026: this setup has since evolved, see the follow-up, [My life in plain text, revisited: Planova and one Markdown file per day](my-life-in-plain-text-using-planova-EN).*

For a long time I used Orgmode files to take notes, todos, and sometimes agenda events. While I like the Orgzly app on Android a lot, I wasn't happy with the sync, and worse, without a specific tool the OrgMode format is quite unusable due to its complexity.

So I tried many, many tools with Markdown support, but all of them seemed to be missing something for my use:

- On Android :
    - Markor: No agenda
    - Joplin: No agenda, and I don't like how the files are named (uuid.txt)
    - GitJournal: Only for journaling
- On Linux :
    - There is the todo.txt CLI to manage todos in a plain text file
    - vim to edit markdown

### Templates

My requirements are quite simple, so I opted for a simple file structure, and templates:

```
todo.txt (todotxt format)
done.txt (todotxt format)
agenda.txt (agendatxt format)
quicknote.txt (markdown)
expenses.txt (expensetxt format)
archives/
attachments/
journal/
  YYYY-mm-dd.txt
notes/
  a_markdown_note.md
  an_other_markdown_note.md
  Projects/
    project_1.md
    project_2.md
Posts/
  my_life_in_plain_text.md
```

#### Todotxt format

[Todo.txt: Future-proof task tracking in a file you control](http://todotxt.org/)

#### Agendatxt format

I've created an agendatxt format similar to todotxt. Each line is an event; three formats are accepted:

```
YYYY-mm-dd event for all day
YYYY-mm-dd HH:MM event at hour:minute
YYYY-mm-dd HH:MM HH:MM event with a start and a end
```

#### Expensetxt format

I've created an expensetxt format similar to todotxt. Each line is an expense:

```
YYYY-mm-dd 000.00 short description
```

#### Markdown format

[Markdown, Wikipédia](https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown)

## On desktop

As a dev I use vim and terminals a lot; I take notes with vim and use some zsh aliases to quickly add a todo or a journal entry.

## On mobile

This is more complex, as I need to quickly visualize events and todos, but also take notes. So I wrote my own app. It's not finished yet, and looks more like a Proof of Concept than a finished app, many features are still missing, but I use it daily.

## Screenshot

<img src="../images/morg_screenshot_main_dark.jpg" alt="MOrg Screenshot" loading="lazy" width="360">

## Licence

And if you want to join me on this journey, you are more than welcome, as it's distributed under the MIT Licence.

[MOrg on GitHub](https://github.com/brvier/MOrg)