Love these: http://www.amazon.com/Computation-Inches-Numbered-Quadrille-...
...but they've become my first draft, rather than my only notebook. It's just too easy to grab a chunk of an email or a graph's png or a code snippet and lob it into the vimwiki; and it's where I work up most of the stuff that goes into papers or patents.
This combined a legally admissible chronological record in physical form, with all the benefits of electronic records.
I have used vim for journaling and as a wiki, but I only used standard vim features. For example "gf" is practically for a flat file wiki-it opens the file named after word currently under the cursor.
Taking your example - Yes, I know of "gf" and "ctrl-o". VimWiki changes that to "enter" and "backspace", and requires no extra steps to visit filenames with spaces.
Not wildly ground-breaking, of course, but I like the end result.
So far it's worked fine for me, even though I wish it supported Markdown out of the box (there's a plugin for it somewhere), rather thank its custom markup. It's somewhat painful to have to remember yet another syntax to achieve the same exact thing.
let g:vimwiki_list = [{'path': '~/my_site/', \ 'syntax': 'markdown', 'ext': '.md'}]
(Now if only I could figure out how to get Vim Touch on Android to correctly format vimwiki pages...)
Zim is also nice for me in supporting LaTeX equations (via a plugin) and being written in Python, I've made a couple of custom tweeks.
A tool ppl might find useful that uses a flat structure: saga. All it does is creates directories in a way so they will always sort in chronological order.
Example:
$ saga python pattern socket client
/home/cturner/saga/20121124.myhostname.myusername.ac.enter.some.terms
$
http://trogrd.tumblr.com/post/36378631988/saga-revisited(thanks kartik)
But yes, if you did those things, you could have that log in the commit logs, but it wouldn't be a fantastic resource - it's more useful to me to have that in a local file here, with just my entries (as opposed to having to extract my entries from the entire team's), in grep-able plaintext.
And you'd also be missing the notebook part of the picture; the stuff in there shouldn't be in commit logs (you're talking about notes from meetings, design notes, patent notes, paper notes, that sort of thing).
If anyone's interested in something like this (structured time-tracking and task-based note taking), drop me an email and I'll let you know when I get to that point.
Mind you, if you were working a lot with JIRA, I could see the appeal...
I was using NV, but the Find-Next feature stopped working from OSX Lion. I then renamed the file extensions to ".wiki". I used some perl scripts to remove the spaces in file names and camel-case them. Used "ls" to create an index page with links to each note. Now i can access my notes both through vim (using vimwiki) and through NV.
vimgrep and the ack plugin are good replacements for NV's search.