A Small Defense of Plain Text

I like plain text because it ages well. Not because it is romantic, and not because GUIs are bad, but because text is inspectable, scriptable, and stubbornly portable. A good text file will outlive several frameworks, at least two sync platforms, and probably one ideology.

Plain text also encourages a certain humility in tool design. If the fundamental object is readable without your application, then your software becomes an enhancement instead of a prison.

This matters more than ever when people build note-taking systems that are beautiful for six months and inaccessible for six years. I am not against rich tooling. I am against hostage formats.

There is a computational reason too. Text composes beautifully with other tools. Search, diff, version control, code generation, and reproducible transforms all become dramatically easier when the source material is transparent.

Not everything should be text, of course. Images should be images. Audio should be audio. But ideas, structure, and instructions benefit from being encoded in a form that other tools can reason about. Plain text is still the closest thing we have to a civic standard for thought.