Bonus points if I can query them like what should I do now? Which movie should I watch (but those are secondary requirements which I would like to have some time in future).

Right now I have two general repos:

1. tomboy desktop wiki. Realistically, this is usually a write only repository for me to get ideas out that I never follow up on. But I like to think the exercise is beneficial, or at least thereapeutic.

2. rocketbook wave + frixion pens. Phone calls, meetings, random engineering diagrams, and the occasional Nikoli puzzle go in here. I just went through my first scan-in and heat erasure cycle, seems to work? These notes I do occasionally refer back to, with I'd imagine an exponential decay model. Needing to know the name of the recruiter I talked to and what they said is more important in the week after than the month or quarter after. Some day I'll try adopting bulletjournal's note style. But for now, meh.

Edit:

I don't even think of these as notes, but I do use a lot of todo lists. I have a Trello board for my video game collection, to track what I have, whether I can sell it, and where i've listed it for sale (and at what price). I have another Trello board for general todos, a caldav server that I've been ignoring lately, and some tasks in google cal that I've also been ignoring.

Check out Notational Velocity http://notational.net/ or its fork nvALT http://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/

I send email to myself. Sometimes I just keep them in drafts.

Evernote is the obvious answer but why isn't it working for you?

I start jotting down my notes in Sublime tabs too. If I choose to save them, they go into an Evernote notebook. "Your second brain" defines Evernote's purpose well, it functions as a long term memory for notes.

Search is simply Ctrl+Q and it also goes through images and docs as well if I'm not mistaken.

Email myself

Zim wiki with Journal and VCS plugins enabled. Or CherryTree.

Also Firefox add-on to copy open tabs url.

Multiple Tab Handler – https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/multiple-tab-... Zim - a desktop wiki – http://zim-wiki.org/ cherrytree – giuspen – https://www.giuspen.com/cherrytree/

Notebooks. They're surprisingly easy to search: if you use them a lot you'll notice that you often remember exactly which page a certain note appears on. You can also help by always starting a new note on a new right-hand page, and writing one or two keywords in the top-right corner.

I normally use Evernote but its been getting very slow on my phone(2-8 seconds before i can input my text) so I was thinking of writing a simple bot for Telegram that would log my messages and set cron-like reminders. I guess i would search it by sending something like "/s words to be searched for" Is that something you would use?

Out of interest, did you do research first to see if anything else would fit? I see a big trend on HN of "This doesn't do X, I'll make my own" - we end up with 5000 weather apps and 8000 'game changing' note taking apps.

Google Keep across all devices.

I use a real-life notebook for anything real-life. I enjoy keeping notes offline. I use a bullet journal style.

For quick meeting notes or todo notes at work, I send myself an email.

Google docs. Sync, offline, voice dictations. I use it many times a day

This. I've been using it for years and its one of the things that keeps me the most productive nowadays.

Hey, maybe http://zenkit.com would be an option for you. You can create different data collections (Kanban Board for example) and then add your data there. There´s also a pretty cool global search feature..as your notes are becoming more and more they might be harder to find so you can just search throughout the whole app. Web-based platform - super easy to use.

I've also done the untitled tabs in Sublime thing.

Workflowy (https://workflowy.com) is worth a try.

It's still very lightweight. You have one doc which has one master root. Then, you can create arbitrarily nested lists of things and zoom in and out of the overall list. You get a daily email of your delta from the day before. There's an okay mobile client but the desktop one is much better feature wise.

I've been using for it everything from an inbox to blog post ideas lately (I just start drafting the post inside Workflowy).