Deft with descriptive filenames
A month or so ago, Jason Blevin announced Deft, an Emacs package for searching and managing notes in plain text files, very much inspired by Notational Velocity. I started using it, and immediately became a fan. (Notational Velocity, while it looked pretty good, was a nonstarter for me by virtue of not being Emacs.)
There was just one tiny hitch. I already had a bunch of notes spread across text files, but unlike Deft, which simply named new files “deft-xxx” and regarded the first line of the contents of the file as its title, I used long descriptive filenames for my files, and considered the filename itself to be the title.
However, Jason was kind enough to accept a patch from me that allowed Deft to (optionally) behave in the mode that I was used to. In case you do something similar, you can grab the latest copy from his git repository.