The Case for Writing in Plain Text

Every few years I lose a piece of writing to a format. A word processor that no longer opens its own files, a note app that shut down, a blog platform that changed hands and quietly broke every link I had ever shared.

The writing that survived all of it was the writing I kept in plain text.

Durability is a feature

A plain-text file has no owner. It does not depend on a company's roadmap or a subscription that lapses. Any computer made in the last forty years can read it, and any computer made in the next forty almost certainly will.

That durability does something to the writer, too. When the file is just words, there is nothing to fiddle with. No fonts to pick, no margins to nudge. The only thing left to improve is the sentence.

The tools that last are the ones that ask the least of you.

Markdown is the right amount of structure

Pure text can be too bare for publishing. Markdown adds just enough: a pound sign for a heading, asterisks for emphasis, a dash for a list. It reads cleanly as raw text and converts cleanly into a web page.

That is the whole system behind this site. A folder of files, each one readable on its own, each one mine.