Why I keep coming back to plain text

14 Sep 2025 · 4 min read

Every few years I try a new note-taking app. Every few years I go back to a folder of .md files and grep.

It's not nostalgia. It's that plain text has properties other formats don't:

• It opens with whatever I have in front of me.
• It survives every migration I've ever done.
• It diffs cleanly in git.
• It doesn't need a network to be useful.

The cost of a format

When I put a note in an app, I'm making a bet that the app will still exist in five years. When I put it in a file, I'm making a much smaller bet — that a text editor will exist, and that future me can still read English.

I've lost more notes to abandoned apps than to disk failure. Disks have backups. Apps just stop launching.

Small discipline, small tools

What works for me, roughly:

~/notes/
  inbox/         # unsorted
  projects/      # one file per project
  reading/       # quotes and links
  journal/       # one file per month

Nothing clever. A few shell aliases. rg when I need to find something. An editor that starts in under a second.

The most durable format is the one you can open with cat.

That's the whole argument. It's not exciting. It doesn't need to be.