Yeah, and probably online-only. Or, if offline-use is allowed, probably use as much memory as his system has free...
And, of course, every 2 years it would stop being supported, be sold to another company, turned into online-only and contain non-stop ads, and he'd maybe switch to a new app.
And relearn how to take notes again.
> It's quirky idea but it's really not that practical.
Seems pretty practical to me:
1. Easy and flexible searching.
2. Very quick to add notes to (Double-clicking on a .txt file takes maybe 250ms to open in Vim).
3. Versioning, if you want it (add it to your repo).
4. Online-editing if he wants that (host it on a WebDAV server).
5. Viewable (and likely editable) on every single device he owns, even his TV if its hosted somewhere.
Downsides:
1. No Ads.
2. Not forced into learning a new workflow every few years.
3. Doesn't cost anything.
(Admittedly, the downside is only a downside for those in the business of trrr to replace the text file)..
That's why I'm so happy with org-mode. Seriously give it a try. It's syntax is not far from what I was using on my own - though it seems that I independently invented Mardown - just that it uses a * for headings rather than # (which I choose because of C comments). Org-mode has been around since around the turn of the century I think. And I'm happy to open the org-mode files in VIM and edit them there if need be.
App require maintenance and are out of your control; right now a chunk of my personal process is a mess because some stuff depended on Evernote. Which was great for about a decade until it got a complete rewrite as an Electron app, and now it's super slow and keeps adding new "friendly" stuff that gets in between me and my notes. I haven't found a replacement that's not full of its own problems and it's impossible to downgrade to the old, perfectly functional native apps on the iThings (and eventually an OS update will break all the apps), it's incredibly frustrating. The parts of my process that depend on writing stuff down in a paper journal, meanwhile, continue to work exactly the same.
Apple Notes will let you import directly from an Evernote export, but it is missing some features (no note links, no quick search/jump, hard to navigate nested folders as notes are hidden by default, no export).