I don't find it useful to force everything into a single file. Instead, I'll organize these text files somewhere inside a directory structure that I can recursively grep. Unlike the OP I do use mutable TODO lists to track high level lists of things that I want to continue to spend mental energy on, but I do like the chronological list of done things and I might think about adding something like that or maybe augmenting the chronological notes file I already have.
I do depart from the world of plain text for keeping track of larger amounts of information such as good papers I encounter, complete blog posts that I might want to refer back to, etc. For this I use the fantastic DEVONthink tool. It's got a large array of powerful features including automatic OCR and indexing of images and an excellent search feature, but the one that I use the most is its ability to make a "web archive" from a link. This downloads all of a web page's resources and stores them in the database locally, making it really easy to refer back to things that I've seen before regardless of whether I have internet access or not, whether the website is still around, etc.