Why I Stopped Using the One Big Text File (OBTF) for Note Taking
May 12, 2025
I had my pretty simple note taking system until I came across this X post by Andrej Karpathy. Karpathy is one of those people on X, whose posts I read religiously for whatever they have to say. In this post he talked about why append-and-review note is his preferred note taking system and more importantly, why it works for him.
The best thing about Karpathy’s note taking system is, it’s ridiculously simple. Things that are this simple can both work for or against you, depending on how you work.
Unfortutenly it didn’t work for me.
Karpathy maintains only a single note for all his note taking purposes. He uses Apple Notes and it syncs to all his devices. He puts all kinds of notes in it: to do, to buy, ideas, code snippets and anything else that comes to mind. He even uses it as a passing clipboard to copy and paste things between applications and devices.
This method of note taking is so simple it only makes sense to use it. Just open your note takng app and jot down whatever is on your mind. That’s it. No cateogry, no formatting and almost no tagging. Karpathy often goes through the notes and pulls a note up that he deems worthy of his attention.
This note taking method’s utter simplicity is what makes you try it for yourself. It’s very similar to the plain text note taking. I know people who swear by this method of putting everything in a single plain text note. This note taking is also known as One Big Text File or OBTF, in short.
I was and still is a user of the plain text note taking. I used it extensively while I was using the termianl to do everything on Linux. Back then, I was taking plain text notes for journaling purposes using the vi text editor.
Those days are long gone. But my love and admiration for the plain text still remain.
I love the idea of plain text note taking and prefer it over proprietary formats because plain text note is future-proof. They are sure to be supported on any device at any point in the future. But I can’t say the same for the proprietary formats.
Plain text note taking is great, but the use of a single plain text file for all your notes may not work for everyone. Especially those who thrive on proper organizations and structures of their notes.
Don’t get me wrong. I love simplicity. That’s my first priority for note taking and others. But I also know that trying to make a system too simple can make it rather complex.
Keeping everything in a single note is, in my opinion, taking simplicity a bit too far. Here you are left at the mercy of the default search. It works fine until you have too much repetitions of the word you are looking for. In that case you can’t help but have to introduce some kind of tagging e.g. hashtags, to search for that specific word faster.
Another issue I found with the One Big Text File (OBTF) is, without some kind of structure or organization, you don’t have much order. You won’t know where a particular note is.
You might not have to know the exact location of every note, but having a sense of where you can find it will give you a better grasp. It’s like the physical note book. You know the location of the notes, maybe not precisely, but you know where to look for things.
The drawback to overreliance on the search is, the bigger the file gets, the slower the search becomes and the more time it usually takes for you to find what you are looking for. Also, you risk losing data while syncing between devices, especially when you make lots of changes to a large file.
Nonetheless, I’ve used a single plain text note or the One Big Text FIle (OBTF) for all my note taking purposes for a month or so after reading Karpathy’s post. And I have to admit, it worked well for me. But looking ahead, things didn’t look that good.
The lack of orgazation and structure would weigh heavy on me going forward as the note gets bigger. Also, finding a particular note would take an unnecessariliy long time. Besides, for some notes I wouldn’t even remember taking them after some time. If you don’t know you have something, it’s the same as not having it.
Karpathy said using multiple notes or usage of tags, structure, etc. put cognitive load on the user. For me, I would rather take on this little surge of cognititve load at the expense of a better organization of my notes.
So I switched back to using my preferred note taking system: the outliner. I came back to Dynalist.
Even with the free version, Dynalist has everything I need for my note taking purposes. It gives me the flexibiity to organize my notes the way I want without getting in the way. It can be as simple or as complex depending on however I want it to be. For my use case, I don’t go overboard and rather keep it as simple as possible.
I could use Workflowy instead, which a the first outliner. It’s development is more active and is more feature-rich now. From my experiences though, I found Dynalist to be noticeably faster than Workflowy. And that’s a dealbreaker for me.
I know that Dynalist is on maintenance mode now. The developers have shifted their focus and put all the resources on Obsidian instead. They have kept Dynalist barely alive with occasional bug fixing at best. But I’m okay with it. As long as Dynalist syncs across my devices and the developers don’t pull the plug on it, I hope to keep using it.