I keep a folder called notes. It has been through three laptops, two operating systems, and one near-disaster involving a failing drive. It is just Markdown files, arranged in directories, stitched together with symlinks. Nothing in it is younger than 2019, and all of it opens in any text editor ever made.

That is the entire argument, really. Plain text is the only format I am certain will still have readers in thirty years, because it has had readers for the last sixty. It is the one file format that can never be orphaned. Nobody needs to maintain it, because it is the raw material everyone else is built on.

Proprietary formats are promises from companies. Plain text is a promise from the universe of tools.

What plain text buys you

The benefits are less glamorous than “own your data” but more durable:

  • Searchability. grep has not needed an update in decades because it still works.
  • Composability. Every tool that reads stdin can read your life.
  • Diffability. Version control can actually show you what changed in a note, not a binary shrug.
  • Longevity. When the app dies, the files remain, boring and perfect.

The part people get wrong

Plain text does not mean primitive. My notes use front-matter, tags and file-system links to build structure without ever leaving text behind: 

---
title: Reading list 2026
tags: [humanities, books]
---

- The Order of Things, Foucault (rereading)
- Las meninas, pintadas, Ortega y Gasset

The structure lives in a thin layer the tools read; the data lives in a layer that will always be readable. When the tools change, I rewrite the layer, not the library.

Against the grain of fashion

There is pressure to put everything into sleek apps with rich databases and beautiful syncing. I am not arguing those are evil. I am arguing that your notes, your diary, your correspondence, the things you would mourn, deserve a format whose survival does not depend on a roadmap.

The quiet case for plain text is not about nostalgia or rebellion. It is about the one property no feature can match: that your words will be readable for exactly as long as you choose to keep them.