The most important for me is quick storage and retrieval, so everything must be keyboard based. To make a note, I press a global hotkey, an editor window pops up, I write the note then close the editor with a hotkey.
It makes it very seamless to make new notes.
And for retrieval I press another global hotkey, a prompt pops up, I start typing and it immediately lists my matching notes (the search query can find the typed words in any order of course), I select from the list with enter and the note is displayed, and can be edited too if needed.
So finding something takes usually at most 5 seconds (pressing the hotkey, typing, selecting). A mouse-based system could not beat this efficency.
Above I only described the general concept which can be implemented with various tools.
I personally use Autohotkey on Windows for the global hotkeys which when pressed activate my running emacs for new note or search (I use orgmode in emacs for notes). And for searching I use the org-rifle package.
It makes it very seamless to make new notes.
And for retrieval I press another global hotkey, a prompt pops up, I start typing and it immediately lists my matching notes (the search query can find the typed words in any order of course), I select from the list with enter and the note is displayed, and can be edited too if needed.
So finding something takes usually at most 5 seconds (pressing the hotkey, typing, selecting). A mouse-based system could not beat this efficency.