At one point I was trying to do a Luhmann's Zettelkasten with one note per txt file, internal linking, etc. I concatenated every piece of txt content I had. It's much simpler.
I have no system anymore. I try to create internal "hashtags" that are ctrl-F searchable. The goal is having something that's always open and at hand. I got plugins for autosaving when the window loses focus, autoloading when changed in disk and it syncs to Dropbox.
I cobbled together in Notepad++ (which has a GUI for this) a small syntax coloring definition that sort of matches my spontaneous habits from old salvaged text. I intend to let this evolve too. E.g. I'm using {braces} to have a little collapse button that hides pieces of text.
Among all the organization/notetaking methods I've tried, this is really the best. No fancy app in the browser, but really effective and fast.
I've written a small article about it here:
How do you access your notes on your phone? How do you edit?
That's basically what this script does except it uses separate files. You run `notes something really cool and important` and it creates a YYYY-MM-DD.txt file for you in a configured directory and appends the arguments to the file on a new line. So every day you get a new file.
Or, if you just run `notes` it opens your configured $EDITOR for that specific day so you can go free form.
I dont use ST3 for proper dev as much cause I use JetBrains IDEs more.
I still would prefer something better for my more permanent notes.
The less temptation to play with CSS, formatting and markup the better. One day it'll all go in a self-contained minimal wiki. Maybe.
On my android phone I use an ancient app called "unote" (installed from an .apk which I keep, it's long since disappeared from Play). Simple, hierarchical plaintext notes, kept in a local sqlite file. Sadly no search, but that just means I have to be disciplined about what, where and pruning.
I've tried to optimize things so that while working, I can get things jotted down with close to zero resistance. If the barrier of entry is too high then I don't bother doing it.
That means often being able to spawn a new terminal, write a command and be done with it. Or to be able to pipe something from my clipboard into an auto-dated file.
I ended up putting together this ~15 line Bash script which seems to do the trick: https://github.com/nickjj/notes
I've been using plain text notes since 2001, although I only recently created this script. So far so good.