[kabdib]

Just one file, backed up regularly. I think the simple is key; one of the sibling replies here has a bit of lisp similar to what I use, and that's it.

The problem with applying a bunch of structure is that you start to screw with the structure, maybe try to turn things into JSON or whatever, pivot by date or technology or location, and a few hours later you've wasted a bunch of time mucking with stuff that you'll probably waste more time mucking with later. Just slamming text into a file and having a minimal syntax for dating things is, I've found, sufficient. I want notes and a little support for continuity ("what the heck was I juggling when I left on Friday?"), not a blog or a platform for deathless prose.

It'd be nice if there was a rich text system similar to Emacs that didn't force you do write markup or handcuff you to a proprietary data format. Truthfully I haven't looked that hard (multi-platform is probably difficult to achieve). I have notes files strung back over twenty years, and simple text is a hard habit to break.