Next question: *tagged* note taker?

no one's mentioned using quicksilver for document searching/indexing else voodoo pad and notational velocity look like your best picks

@#10: Andy, KIT is awesome, awesome, awesome. I can't believe I never ran across it before. I can use the comments section to essentially do tagging, and the smart groups function... oh, I am in heaven! It lacks one feature I realize is becoming increasingly essential: not just search, but *browse* by tags. But it's close enough. I'm totally using it. @#11: No offense, but I have no love for Filemaker. If I'm going to build my own database for this, I may as well do it online with PHP/mySQL. Which I started doing a while ago, had to abandon for lack of time, and may pick up again. @#12: I love VoodooPad too and recommended it here for Freeware February. But yet, the problem with this and the series of online wikis I've had is that they don't scale well, and once the dataset becomes very large (which doesn't take long), I find it difficult to refactor... and boring to refactor. This isn't neccessarily particular to wikis - I find almost everything very difficult in the refactoring department, but still. @#13: Erik, I just last night accidentally stumbled on a piece of software from the makers of DevonThink that basically does this and more via a GUI: EasyFind. It's free, so it will most definitely be covered soon enough for Freeware Feb! :)

How about you use any app you want for writing your notes. Then if you're comfortable using the cmd-line you use a simple alias like: $ alias SearchTextFiles='find ~/Documents -name "*.txt" -print | xargs grep ' Once you have the alias just give it the string you want to search for. I love searching from the cmd-line. My take is it's much more powerful. $ SearchTextFiles junk ./file1.txt:this is some junk. ./file2.txt:junk, junk, junk. You get the point.

VoodooPad probably fits the bill. It lets you build your own little wikis and link pages together. And it's searchable. And they make it easy to dump your data out into a bunch of formats for safe keeping. Creating linked pages is effortless. I just love it to bits. http://flyingmeat.com/voodoopad.html

If you have FileMaker Pro, you can set up a database for your notes.

If you can't wait for Spotlight you might want to look at KIT. http://www.reinventedsoftware.com/kit/index.html

I recommend Tinderbox as well. It can seem strange at first, but once you "get it" you'll find it really handy for taking notes, etc. And you can search though things quickly. You can also create "agents" that can scan though your notes and build meta notes or lists automatically. Things get really interesting when you take the time to play around with it's export features. You can create something simple like a web page or something as complex as an entire weblog, including links, navigation, archives, etc.

I use DevonThink despite it's storage method because now that I have a couple of thousand documents it handles the categorization for me. It's not exactly tagging but you can group a single document in DT into multiple groups. While I use DT for storage of articles and other third-party material I use Tinderbox for my own writing. I've set up a Category attribute that use for tagging. I just comma-delimit the tags. If you want a DT style app that stores everything accessibly you could look at Hog Bay Notebook. It stores notes as RTFs inside a bundle.

While it doesn't explictily support tagging, I do quite well with Notational Velocity http://pubweb.nwu.edu/~zps869/nv.html it's tiny, fast and to the point: just store and search text in there, with appropriate keyboard shortcuts.

> On the other hand, the fatal flaw with knowledge > collectors like DevonThink and StickyBrain is that they > keep your files in proprietary databases that you have > to remember to backup and/or export periodically. Try > as I might, I can never seem to remember to do these > sorts of periodic actions. (NOTE: I haven't used either app) Are they AppleScript friendly? If so it'd probably take about 30 minutes of minor hacking to make a script that will export/backup/whatever you need. Once you've done that, go hack up /etc/crontab so that your Mac will remember to backup your data and you won't have to. To get a backup every Friday (say) you'd need to add a line like this to /etc/crontab: 0 0 * * Fri root osascript < path to your script > Just my $0.02