Posted in Personal

Replacing Notion with Markdown Files and git

I'm in the tin foil hat era and I've been doing a ton of breaking up recently. I'm getting fatigued on AI features I don't need let alone use. I'm even more sick of the fact that these features are driving up prices of certain services. More than anything, I'm tired of having to think about which EULA update I didn't read thoroughly enough to see that my data is being fed into an LLM.

Overall, I'm still very much enjoying the agentic AI wave.

So, Notion's been on my shit list for a minute. Since January to be exact. They rolled out some lovely new marketing ads that made it look like something was being recorded. It was a little widget that said "You're transcribing..." in the Notion app.

Now considered malware, I removed the damned thing.

So fast forward a few months later. I've come to realize a few things about notes. First, most of the time I jot things down and don't act upon them and/or forget about them.

This isn't an issue with any one note-taking app, and more of a process problem on my end. What I realized is that most of my notes are just blog topics waiting to be written and published on my personal site.

My blog's always been a place that I document things, usually computer issues I've run into. I use my blog's search pretty regularly to look up some odd thing I vaguely remember running into previously. It's always nice when I already documented it. Even nicer if the post is still accurate.

The other thing I realized is that I have little to no need for notes on my phone. Sure, I still need shopping lists, and it's good to have a scratch pad. Simply put, I don't need everything in my life duplicated in my pocket. Since most notes are related to computing tasks, they can live in the context of my computers.

With that being said, I do need my notes to be accessible across both Linux and macOS. This is what drove me to Notion to begin with, having a third-party app that worked on both.

Well, both macOS and Linux have file systems. I run the same terminal app (Alacritty) on each one. Turns out I use the same editor too. Hell, I even have git available on each one.

Not dissimilar from how I run this site. Most sites. Nearly everything in my life come to think of it.

So my notes stack is pretty basic:

With this setup, if I do want to use an LLM, it's on my terms, and in the scope that I'd like. Not some catch all feature that's already touched everything in my account.

I do try to commit regularly, but I primarily use git as a way to see if anything changed. This is especially helpful if a robot happens to be involved.

I'm testing the waters right now on having the cloned git repo live out in Dropbox. The idea is that I get an automatic offsite backup plus syncing to each machine. Saves me from needing to git pull to sync the files. Small added bonus of being able to pull up a note on my phone if I really had to.

Keep in mind, Dropbox is most likely going to be on the chopping block soon as well. Tin foil hat and all. But currently, I am pretty satisfied with this setup.