According to the Life Hacks research done by Danny O’Brien, Unix geeks uniformly prefer using plain text files to track their to-do lists. In a computing era when beautiful GUI applications will perform innumerable activities to keep track of you and your data, why would anybody still poke at plain text files, especially on the utilitarian command line of all things?
The question contains the answer: the geeks don’t want feature-bloated programs performing innumerable activities to their data. They want to pick and choose what they write down (or rather, type in), how they manipulate it, what has access to it, and when something gets changed. And they also want to be able to see the trees for the forest, so to speak, without the GUI getting in the way of their work.
See our Plaintext category for a list of posts on the topic.