- Good support for recording structured information.
- History management; what changed and when.
- Simple and readily accessible enough to collect/manage unstructured and “In-progress” information.
The first two are what most systems fail at, doing the latter, hell you can do with a collection of Post It! Notes if you know how not to spill your drink. Having a vim session running in dtach, that I can share e.g. between multiple tmux/screen sessions, helps. But it’s really my “Scratch Notes” file that makes it easy. It’s a structured dumping bin for the here and now: what I’m doing or what I want to note. Things either get aged off; “Eh, ain’t parsed that in a month, bye, bye!”; or being transitioned to a suitable file. For example, while working on X, I may make notes applicable to Y and Z; afterwards I rip them out at leasire and incorperate them into suitable notes. I attribute the concept of a “Scratch” note to Emacs. It has a *scratch* buffer open initially, where you can collect snippets of text you don’t want to save, and can readily evaluate elisp code; very fundimental for emacs users. Me, well, I kind of like the same idea, but in a more perm’ note.