Reading through the comments under this thread, there are many users who swear by a plain text file, but who then build quite a lot of snowflake software to regain functionality offered by more structured TODO applications. That includes:
- having your computer alert you to things that come up
- being able to tag notes
- being able to add events to a calendar
- being able to set priority of tasks
- expecting prioritized/currently relevant tasks to be at the top of the agenda
- being able to add recurring tasks
- full-text search (grepping)
- formatting features (markdown)
Some of the laborious (or, in my opinion, plain unholy) solutions include:
- feeding TODOs to an LLM to filter for the currently relevant ones and send Telegram notifications
- hand-copying currently relevant tasks to the top of the TODO list
- running a script on a VPS to sync notifications
- set up cron job with git commit
- writing post-it notes by hand
I would encourage everyone to try out emacs with org-mode. It takes some time to get used to the editor and its keybindings (though provisions exist for vim users), but _every_ item on the list above is handled out of the box, or is offered through a free and maintained plugin.
The author of the OP claims to have tried _every_ todo app, and has afterwards moved (regressed?) to writing notes in a plain text file, but there is a path extending from this point that the author has not walked yet. I strongly suggest that, especially for people with a computing or technical background, it is an undisputed upgrade. https://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html being the bible, of course.
- having your computer alert you to things that come up
- being able to tag notes
- being able to add events to a calendar
- being able to set priority of tasks
- expecting prioritized/currently relevant tasks to be at the top of the agenda
- being able to add recurring tasks
- full-text search (grepping)
- formatting features (markdown)
Some of the laborious (or, in my opinion, plain unholy) solutions include:
- feeding TODOs to an LLM to filter for the currently relevant ones and send Telegram notifications
- hand-copying currently relevant tasks to the top of the TODO list
- running a script on a VPS to sync notifications
- set up cron job with git commit
- writing post-it notes by hand
I would encourage everyone to try out emacs with org-mode. It takes some time to get used to the editor and its keybindings (though provisions exist for vim users), but _every_ item on the list above is handled out of the box, or is offered through a free and maintained plugin.
The author of the OP claims to have tried _every_ todo app, and has afterwards moved (regressed?) to writing notes in a plain text file, but there is a path extending from this point that the author has not walked yet. I strongly suggest that, especially for people with a computing or technical background, it is an undisputed upgrade. https://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html being the bible, of course.