devnotes.vim is a vim (http://www.vim.org) plugin that streamlines development note taking. It's also shipped with an useful statusline function, to get a quick peek on how many notes are still pending.
Copy all files to your ~/.vim directory or use Tim Pope's excellent pathogen plugin (http://github.com/tpope/vim-pathogen).
:call DevNotes() will run open a split buffer with your notes.
See the full documentation for more.