It seems to me that the reason note taking is complex, and so fractured, is because of lack of label support in OS's. Data is mismanaged at the data level, and

It seems to me that the reason note taking is complex, and so fractured, is because of lack of label support in OS's. Data is mismanaged at the data level, and we are looking for solutions to that problem with applications rather than at the OS level where it belongs. The file tree idea, where a file exists in only one place in the hierarchy is wrong. I'd rather all my notes/files were in one big bucket, but that I could label each, and then sort by labels. I may want to label a file as 'software', 'tech-architecture' and 'finance' - all of them. When I look up any one of those labels, I want to get all the related content. I shouldn't need to guess which bucket I put a note into. So, I say labels should be data associated to files like modified date, or author. To fix the problem of 'no label' as part of the data, I try to use a note taking that applies labels for me. But then an app developer is going to want to do all sorts of extra stuff. I understand that having tons of label data on the file could become ridiculous though. Perhaps the real answer would be to have a hidden metadata file associated with the data itself (eg 'mytext.txt.meta') - labels and any other metadata would go in here, separate to the note 'mytext.txt' itself. So, I think OS's enforce a data organisational structure on us that is unnatural to the way we think and work. And we seek to fix it with apps. And we will never get satisfaction that way :(