I started doing this at my first job in 1985. There is a direct lineage of the file to a few of the text files I use today. "todo.txt", "address.txt", and "dates.txt" have morphed continuously for 35 years.

Besides this reminiscence, I wanted remind vim users of a particular feature that allows easily navigating between text files like a hypertext system. The "gf" key sequence (mnemonic: go file). Typing "gf" will cause vim to extract the text under the cursor (it doesn't have to be at the head of the string) and open the file of that name. If you have ':set path=..' established, it also searches for the named file using that path order.

For example, in my main TODO I have a section like this for notes on things I want to attend to for various websites I maintain:

    ---------- websites todos -----------
    family website:   c:/path/to/this/todo.txt
    personal website: c:/path/to/that/todo.txt
    resume:           c:/path/to/other/todo.txt
    emulator:         c:/path/to/emulator/todo.txt

Just place the cursor over one I wanted to visit, hit 'gf' then I'm teleported to that document.