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I use Microsoft's OneNote for this. The search works amazingly well and is fast.

I've been tempted by this, but I have some reservations:

1. Does it work under less-used OSs? Linux/BSD..?

2. Is it a proprietary format? Will you be able to open the file in a decade? My text files will be able to be opened, I'm not sure anyone can still open their MSWorks files.

Maybe I'm crazy to worry about opening these files after a decade since using them probably isn't worth while unless you keep up with it. However, I've got files from the 90's that I've been transitioning from machine-to-machine since storage costs keeps getting cheaper.

No, and yes. It's proprietary and Windows/Android/iOS-only.

Toss Mac in there as well:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/microsoft-onenote/id78480155...

That's false, you can download documentation for the OneNote file format here

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd924743(v=office.1...

it is only about 5% of the size of the Adobe PDF specification and I am sure there are corner cases, but it is not too bad.

I admittedly did not know that they published a specification . It's still a proprietary file format though. Proprietary does not mean "binary and undocumented", it means that it's not an open standard.

Word can still open Works files to this day.

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