A good notebook app tends towards Emacs. I've got my own notebook app which I've been using for over 10 years and across three different jobs. It started out

A good notebook app tends towards Emacs. I've got my own notebook app which I've been using for over 10 years and across three different jobs. It started out with very little structure, just a persistent text box and a persistent infinite undo log. The first line of text is used as the title. No search beyond title search. I first added structure by taking advantage of the undo log to delete blocks, "collapsing" them to a summary; I could rewind the log to recover the text if necessary, which wasn't super frequent. This made a lot of sense in the job I had at the time, where I did a lot of depth-first debugging and didn't need the maximum depth of the stack around for context once I was done with it. In my next job, I started using it as a mix of high-level todo notes, design sketches and task implementation notes which were a mix of research and implementation steps. I didn't need a lot more structure but I did add a tool to help during yearly review, which iterated through the logs to help me plot where I'd been spending my time. In my current job, I spend a lot more time in meetings and multi-tasking. Todos can come from anywhere - research, an implementation task, various meetings - so I switched to a sigil approach, dropping '=>' for a todo and changing it to 'x>' when done. I have a hotkey to globally find all '=>' lines. I spend a lot more time building context and I have a lot more context to build too, so I invested in incremental multi-word search (a bit like helm occur but across all notes). My notes have become even more modal. Different modes I'd like to start breaking out: * 1:1 meeting doc; keeps information about 1:1s but also notes for context about the person * Interviews; a templated structure around a question and a slice of time with contemporaneous note log. * Recurring meetings; my personal notes (rather than shared meeting notes) which includes things like todos for my followup / research on context * Bugs / tasks; what I used the notepad for originally, could do with more structure to encapsulate the 'depth then breadth' iteration through a list of tasks * Research / document prototyping; a more outline driven model which captures some level of hierarchy I am strongly inclined to add a sexpr reader and a simple interpreter to start capturing these modes.