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by xenodium·4y ago·view on hn ↗
I loved reading Atomic Habits during the first lockdown. I was excited to try out its actionables, specially tracking to keep me honest.

I tried a bunch of iOS apps, but wanted no friction, no tracking, no cloud, no social, etc. so eventually built https://flathabits.com. Also wanted to own my habit data (as plain text), so I made sure Flat Habits stored its data locally as an org file.

I'm an Emacs nutter and can say the strength of a habit tracker lies in removing daily friction from the tracking process itself. The plain text part is cherry on top (bringing piece of mind around lock-in). In my case, it's been months since I looked at the plain text file itself.

As for forming habits themselves (the actual goal)... it's been well over a year since I started running. I've kept it up since reading Atomic Habits (and started tracking).

7 comments
Whoa, this is the app I've been looking for. Thank you so much. Every app under the sun now requires an account, has a friends list and stores data remotely.

Please let me pay you for this app.

> Please let me pay you for this app.

If you wanna send me money, you can buy my other app ;) https://plainorg.com

I was thinking this looks a lot like Plain Org. Those Emacs users must have a shared iOS UX or something. Nope it’s the same developer. Great job!
Thank you :)
I would love to use this. Android please :(
Sorry. It's a native iOS app.
I've been struggling in finding the right way to track my habits from apps to notepad. Thank you for this seems like it will definitely help me focus!
> Optionally, you can save your habits to a shared location or cloud

How do you do this bit? Is it documented anywhere? (or maybe I'm missing the obvious)

Aha! I tried the export menu didn't look at the import option

Nice one :)

For the sake of sharing I'm looking at setting it up the same as my Obsidian dir from here. Get it all chucked into git using the synced dir option in Working Copy, and a pair of Shortcuts to resync the git repo whenever I open/close the app (just the on close one if it doesn't play nicely with the file changing after opening the app)

e.g. https://img.imgy.org/rAxr.jpg plus a shortcut triggered by app close to run this shortcut

Is there an Android version of this? Looks really cool.
Thanks. Nice to hear there’s interest. Unfortunately, it’s a native iOS app. Android support is out of scope for me.
May I build the Android version? :)
I too would love an android app.
I've tried a few and this is my favorite habit tracker app on Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.isoron.uha...

Ad-free and FOSS: https://github.com/iSoron/uhabits

Oo I'll give this a shot. Thanks so much!