Plain Text Is the Final Frontier

Markdown won. It is hard to remember now, but for a brief and embarrassing decade in the early 2000s it looked like the future of writing was going to be locked into proprietary, format-of-the-week silos. We had Word, we had Google Docs, we had a parade of WYSIWYG content editors that thought they were the future of all text.

And then, mostly through the patient persistence of programmers who refused to write in anything else, plain text won. We are typing in Markdown now, in Notion and Slack and Linear and Discord and our editors, and the formats that thought they were going to win — TextBundle, Apple Notes, you name it — are now historical curiosities.

Why plain text outlives its hype

• It is grep-able.
• It is diff-able.
• It survives migrations between every text-handling tool ever built.
• It is human-readable in any state, including corrupted.
• It does not require a vendor to be alive.

Plain text is what we keep coming back to because plain text is the format that does not betray you. Every other format, eventually, is held hostage by the company that owns it. Plain text belongs to no one. That is its superpower.

If you want your writing to outlive your career, write in plain text. The format is the message.