I'm another fan of text files. My system has grown a bit over the years I've been keeping my notes like this. I have a shell alias to open vim with a file in my

I'm another fan of text files. My system has grown a bit over the years I've been keeping my notes like this. I have a shell alias to open vim with a file in my diary subdir, named according to the current date. That stays open all day, and is where I write and record everything that doesn't fit into an organized project. Topic-specific notes go into other text files, depending on subject. Pyblosxom running over that whole directory hierarchy gives me a presentable view of all my notes in a browser (with slightly-modified markdown for formatting). It gets synced to Dropbox, and is also a hg repository that I intermittently push to a server for safekeeping. Honestly I've very rarely wanted to check the revision history, but it's there if I need it. [and another advantage of plain text]. It may sound over-elaborate, but that's just because it's grown over the years according to what i've needed. I'll probably add some kind of lightweight tagging/search system soon, if only because at >1m words, it's reaching the point where grep is a bit sluggy. And it's hard to overstate the benefits of having a view of my daily life, year by year.