Why your writing belongs in plain text
Apps come and go. Formats become obsolete. Plain text lasts forever. Here's why Markdown is the most future-proof way to write.
In 1995, Microsoft released Word 6.0 for Windows. Documents created in that format are largely unreadable today without a compatibility layer and a prayer. In 1995, someone also wrote a plain text file. You can open it right now, in any text editor on any platform, with no conversion, no plugin, and no subscription.
That gap has only widened.
The problem with rich formats
Every proprietary format is a bet on a company staying alive, staying motivated, and staying free. Notion, Bear, Roam, Obsidian — these are great tools. Some of them are excellent. But all of them, at some level, hold your writing hostage to their continued existence and business model.
Even open formats aren't immune. Docx is nominally open, but truly reading it requires Word-compatible software. ODT is free but not universal. RTF was supposed to be the answer in 1987 and it's mostly a forgotten curiosity now.
What makes plain text different
A plain text file has no format version. There is no schema to upgrade, no renderer to install, no license to renew. It's bytes representing characters in an encoding every computer has understood for decades. The file you create today will be readable in 2060 by something that hasn't been invented yet.
Markdown adds structure to plain text without abandoning any of its properties. A .md file is still just text. You can read it in a terminal, a code editor, a notes app, a web browser, a cat command in a shell. The markup syntax — **bold**, # heading, [link](url) — is readable as plain text even without rendering. It describes itself.
The portability argument
When you write in Markdown, moving your writing is trivial. Export to HTML and it's a web page. Render it in any markdown parser and it becomes formatted output. Feed it to pandoc and it becomes a PDF, a Word document, an ebook. Paste it into a GitHub README and it renders automatically. Embed it in documentation systems, wikis, static site generators.
No migration. No export-and-hope. Just copy the file.
The ownership argument
Ownership of your writing means more than holding a copy. It means being able to do anything with that copy — today, next year, and twenty years from now — without anyone's permission or product existing.
Plain text files stored locally satisfy this completely. They don't expire. They don't require internet. They don't get deprecated. They aren't subject to terms of service. A text file stored on your hard drive is as permanent as anything digital can be.
The practical reality
None of this is theoretical. Writers who used early blog platforms lost years of work when those platforms shut down. Students who wrote dissertations in obscure word processors spent months recovering formatting. Companies who built documentation in proprietary wikis lost institutional knowledge during migrations.
Meanwhile, writers who kept plain text files — emails, journal entries, notes — have archives that are fully accessible decades later.
What this means for how you write
It means choosing formats with a long half-life. It means preferring files you own over documents you access. It means using tools that produce output you can read without the tool.
Markdown is the clearest embodiment of these principles for formatted writing. It's been around since 2004, it's been adopted by GitHub, Reddit, Stack Overflow, Discord, and thousands of other platforms, and it has shown zero signs of obsolescence. Every major operating system can render it natively or with minimal tooling.
Write in Markdown. Store your files locally. The writing you do today will be with you as long as you want it.