I just use vim-markdown (which provides basic to-do list features and nice handling of bullets, indent, etc.) and some shell functions. One is `note`, which when passed a title, creates a markdown file in my notes directory with the date and that title and then pops it into vim. The other is `notes`, which uses fzf to provide a fuzzy finder of all the notes in my notes directory, and then opens the selected one.

I used to be a BIG spacemacs guy because I liked org so much, but I found that TaskWarrior does task tracking better, TimeWarrior does time tracking better (especially with the taskwarrior <-> timewarrior hook, it's magic!) and Vim does outlining only slightly worse but benefits from all the other optimizations I have in my vimrc.

Next thing I'm going to add is a shell function that uses pandoc to convert my notes files into HTML on demand.