It’s quite remarkable that the simple act of writing down a thought or an idea on a piece of paper using a boring pen created a market for tools for networked thought, personal knowledge management systems, or open-source knowledge bases. I am by no means immune to that. I am an avid note-taker, and appreciate tools (both analog and digital) that support me with that.
While journaling for me is a deliberate act of mind-cleansing, developing your own ideas follows sometimes a different dynamic (while I do concede that journaling helped me to come up with new ideas). A holistic approach to develop ideas is to start bottom up from within the system. For this purpose, I use a combination of analog and digital tools.
I use Obsidian quite extensively for digital note-taking - I transfer notes I take in my notebook to it, I manage my personal wiki here, which all helps me with idea emergence.
I write notes in Markdown for which this tool is perfect. The app is basically a front-end to display Markdown files. However, it is also capable to link notes which is its most powerful feature.
Markdown is a simple, yet powerful file format that is easy to read without the need of specialized software. This means that my files could outlast a software - an approach to digital note-taking that gives ownership back to people.