[brazed_blotch]

Spent the last week's evenings researching this. Make a list of the features you need. For me, using markdown and YAML frontmatter was the best solution.

As for traversing the notes, I picked VSCode (I would have picked Obsidian but it does funny things with front matter that I didn't like, and it lagged a lot on my computer). Primarily because it has extensions that update links automatically when the filepath to a note changes, and for graph view. You can use vim inside VSCode as a text editor. That's all I need really - VSCode to traverse, vim to edit.

What's great about this system is it really does stick strictly to commonmark and YAML usage isn't restricted at all (you don't even have to use the frontmatter if you don't want to), so your notes are completely portable.

Edit: typo