Most of my notes are in an big OmniOutliner (http://www.omnigroup.com/products/omnioutliner/ http://www.omnigroup.com/products/omnioutliner/) document called No

Most of my notes are in an big OmniOutliner (http://www.omnigroup.com/products/omnioutliner/ http://www.omnigroup.com/products/omnioutliner/) document called Notes.oo3. I find the outline format best for me when taking notes, because if I come to the computer and I want to write multiple things down, I can just write the first bullet for each of them so I don't forget the main ideas and then write the sub-bullets afterwards. Sadly, OO only lets you search the whole document, not just the top-level bullets, so it's a bit hard to find old stuff, but the convenience of bullets outweighs that annoyance. The notes in that file are in two sections: Permanent, for notes I want to keep long-term or which will always exist, like a list of the programming projects I am currently working on, and Temporary, which is like a to-do list. I also use Notational Velocity (http://notational.net/ http://notational.net/) for a few things that don't need to be outlines and can just be a list, because it is easy to search. My ideal note-taking program would be Notational Velocity, with all text in an outline format instead of free text. (I know you can simulate outlines with the tab key, but the indentation on multi-line bullets is wrong, and you can't drag bullets around like you can in OmniOutliner.)