Back in 2011 I wrote a short piece on the beauty of plain text files, and I thought I’d revisit the issue a bit after reading Thorin Kosowski’s Lifehacker article, I Still Use Plain Text for Everything, and I Love It
Kosowiski writes,
Even though I love organization and gravitate to it in many facets of my life, it’s not important to me with stuff like basic notes or to-dos. What is important is simplicity. I want to quickly open an app, write down what I need to, then close it without thinking about what tag it should get, what formating [sic] to add, or whatever else. Just give me an empty sheet of paper and a blinking text icon.
I still find writing with plain text to be essential. Both to avoid lock-in, as well as to grapple with the actual ideas that I am trying to convey. A lot of shitty ideas seem to find their way into emails and on websites where 90 percent of effort appeared to go into formatting and fancy graphics rather than any thoughtful writing process.
Same thing with taking notes at meetings and in other situations. Just pop open a text editor, and get everything down in an accessible, easily searchable format. Most of my notes for meetings end up in my email so they’re searchable and accessible anywhere. There is nothing I hate more than meeting agendas or notes in .doc or some other format that can’t easily be found when suddenly needed.
Unlike Kosowiski, however, I am not a big fan of using plain text to manage to-dos and other tasks. At a minimum, however, such systems need to be able to accept plain text as input (for example, importing a plain text file to add items to a todo list), and export in plain text files for backup purposes/offline access.
And that is the beauty of plain text–after all these years there is still nothing that is as flexible to use on a computer for so many different purposes. And yet the world still is enamored with crapware like MS Word. Sigh.