It's been about a year since I started self-hosting for my digital scribbling needs, and am managing without SaaS providers. Having completed a small tweak of my setup today, wanted to share where I run from, and where I have arrived.
Digital note taking
Due to the chaos of modern lifestyle, I knew from early on, that moleskines and fountain pens wouldn't catch on with me, so I didn't even try. However, about right after the uni, when my lifestyle became more adult-like, with its inherent responsibilities, I explored mobile apps for-to do lists and reminders. My absolute champion of old was Wunderlist; I soon augmented my note-taking zoo with Evernote, and then with Trello. Although the latter didn't stick with me, I continued to use the former two, to use way past the time when they stopped being cool.
The break
I don't blame respective buyers of Wunderlist and Evernote, they do need to make returns on their investment, which means that an initially generous free-tier becomes first irritating, then suffocating. The folks whose digital scribblings have more intrinsic value would upgrade at this point, and continue their smooth sailing, the price-conscious ones would be transitioning to the next thing. There is always the current fashionable option, which wins new users, works as blaze and has generous freemium. But, once the pattern is learned, it's only humane to not want to touch a hot stove again.
New direction
Thus, this post isn't about migrating from Wunderlist to Superlist. It's about migrating to open-source solutions, and not just any, but those which have been around for decades:
- Evernote -> vim with wiki.vim plugin
- MS Todo (nee Wunderlist) -> taskwarrior
Hopefully, the next migration to yet another set of new tools will be sometime after the mid-century.
wiki.vim
After trying Obsidian and silverbullet [ where the latter looked just amazing ], I opted for more simplicity, and started using wiki.vim, which is an opinionated remix of a more popular plugin vimwiki, differentiated from it by native support of a daily journal. Migrating to it from Evernote was easy thanks to the evernote2md.
taskwarrior
This migration wasn't as ironed-out by predecessors, and I ended up coding a little to make it possible. Tasks are exported from microsoft in a proprietary, but documented binary format: pst. The open-source tools for converting pst archives into plain text do exist. The caveat, however, is that the open-source tools mostly serve email archives; todo archives are slightly different. So, I ended up creating a tool of my own, which still works off of what libpff produces, but then fills in the last step of todo-specific parsing that libff has omitted. It ended up working great: my personal task-setting workflow is such that besides the short-term todos, like the proverbial "don't-forget-the-milk", the longer-term ones, e.g.: research article or a book to read get written down too.
My daily, "milk"-related todos have been jotted down (and crossed out) with taskwarrior for a couple of years already, but during all this time I was procrastinating importing from MS Todo, which contained all my article, book, and movie recommendations, accumulated over 8+ years. Now, having run migrate-mstodo-to-tw once the import has been done, and with a sigh of relief I've removed MS Todo from my devices. The taskwarrior's stats speak to this transition best:
