The BigLig Thinks

It appears that the real geeks use a different method, known as "one great big honking text file". You just put everything into a huge text file, and use things like search, grep, Vi macros, little scripts, and so on to work on it.
For example, you could make a list in your file like so:
[ ] Collect Underpants
[X] ?????
[ ] Profit
and grep it for [ ] to get a todo list.
This idea is intriguing to me, although there does not seem to be a definitive guide on how to make it work. Maybe that is a hint that I should try it, and annotate my results.
Some ideas that immediately occur:
The [ ] and [x] above.

• A vim macro to put the date in at the beginning of the line? Seems possible. Time to learn Vim, perhaps.
• Add contexts at the end - @Andy
• Add project titles at the end - %Exchange
• Write a script to make lists and produce a printable document.
• Write a script to parse tagged mails and add it to the file?