I basically do this, too. One big text file. My twist that makes it work for me is a slightly modified text editor that I only use to edit this file.

That way I’ve got a dedicated dock icon and context just for writing notes, but no other overhead. It’s important to me that it not feel like a product, and search works effortlessly (although subject to typo misses).

My only tweak on the text editor is a shortcut to insert a timestamp and a chunk of new lines, which I do periodically so I can separate moments in time and see what I was working on when, how I fixed something, etc.

I used obsidian for a while, but for my purposes it felt like work to organize and get “right”. I ended up writing a script to join all the files into one.