Why a Plaintext Habit Tracker

There are approximately one thousand habit-tracking apps. Most of them want you to sign up, subscribe, sync to a server, and engage with a streak counter for gamification. Some of them are genuinely well-made. I've enjoyed more than a few in the past. But all of them store your data somewhere you cannot easily review it and use elsewhere.

The friction isn't the app itself — it's the feeling that the data I'm generating is being held somewhere at arm's length from me, behind an interface someone else controls. If I want to know how often I logged "gym" in March, I need to open the app, navigate to a chart, and hope the visualization agrees with my question. I cannot just look at the file.

So I built a habit tracker that prioritizes the data over the visuals. The data's all stored in .txt files, making them one of the most universal and portable formats I could think of.

The Flipper Zero is usually in my pocket. While it's not as universal as a phone, my phone is a context-switching machine: opening an app on it is an invitation to get distracted by six other things. The Flipper is a dedicated device with a five-way D-pad and a back button. There's not much to be distracted by. I open the app, scroll to the habit, press OK, and I'm done.

Each habit is a .txt file. The filename serves as the habit name. Each entry is a timestamp appended to the end of the file:

2026-05-18 14:32

2026-05-18 19:45

2026-05-19 07:12

That's it. You can pull the file off the SD card and load it in any text editor on basically any machine that has ever existed. You can grep it, diff it, import it into a spreadsheet, feed it to a script, or read it directly with your own eyes. You can edit it manually if you made a mistake. Calculate whatever you want from it: frequency, time between entries, day of the week most completed on... whatever. There is no schema to learn, no API to query, no export button to find. Just data in a format that is easy to work with.

You don't even need to use it for habits specifically. It'll count anything, provided you don't need to log more than one entry per minute.

Does it actually work? Partially. The logging friction is generally low, so long as it isn't buried in your Flipper's app list.

What it doesn't do is remind me. There are no notifications or no systems that ping me when a habit is overdue. This is a deliberate non-feature — I have enough nagging notifications — but it does mean the tracker is passive. It records when I remember to log something. Whether that's enough depends on what you're trying to track. A future expansion plan would let me add entries to the .txt files via NFC stickers, which would let me place programmed stickers in locations that serve as reminders, or simply further reduce the barrier to logging entries.

For me, though, the app itself works as it is. The data is mine, it's readable, and the Flipper is already in my pocket. That's a reasonable starting point.

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