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When you choose to keep your notes in locally stored plain text files, you’re choosing to be your own landlord. Keeping notes in a proprietary app is the same as renting: the land you’re building on belongs to someone else, with no guarantee of continuing access.
It was good to see Steph Ango, Obsidian’s CEO, using the same analogy I’ve been ruminating on for years. The only time renting anything makes sense is when you have no other choice, or when it’s a temporary, strategic move and when the rented property is not your only home base. For example, writing the draft of your book in text files then working in Scrivener to prepare them for publication.
It shouldn’t be confusing, confronting, or complicated to be in charge of the things you write. It should be the norm! As well as ubiquitous linking, I would like to see the day when developers of proprietary apps have interoperability as the foundation of their work. By this I mean that any app whose working documents can only be opened and worked with in and with that app, should integrate some kind of automatic, configurable export.
The Goodnotes notes app shows how this can work. With auto backups turned on, you can happily work in the Goodnotes proprietary format that PDF backups are happening in the background.
Workflowy is another superb example of an app that cares for your data. The paid version can automatically create a daily export in .txt format. If you’re inclined to try out Workflowy, this referral link will give us both extra features on the free plan. (FYI, I used to keep my calendar in Workflowy)
There are other apps that fit this category and workarounds for many of the rest. Apple’s Reminders, for example, can be exported to an open format but you have to remember to do it. I’m more interested in proprietary apps that have already thought this through, and which have built the exit door into the framework of their offering.
Mark Koester shares how he organises his notetaking, organisational and writing systems using plain text files in this 2019 essay.
In it he explores—
Here are my answers to Mark’s questions:
Plain text files are files that can be opened and read on any device (even those from the 1960s). There’s no lock in (or out) to any one app, and no subscriptions. There’s also no pretty-pretty or database magic built in, though you can add a surprising amount of sorcery without Frankensteining your supremely portable text.
Any text editor can edit plain text files. I like the added features of Obsidian and iA Writer. There’s also Notenik, Logseq, Silver Bullet, Tangent, and VS Code, plus many more.
I organise my files with a combination of folders, wikilinks, and tags. The PARA method is the simplest for people starting out, while Johnny Decimal is fantastic for the static information needed to organise a household or business.
My notes are to ground my thoughts, to pin them where I can see and make sense of them. My twin goals are to understand the who-why-where-what-how of life, and to share things that shine a light of practical help, hope and encouragement into the world. This is a work in progress and probably always will be.
Another aspect of a plain text life (i.e. one that you control), is having a personal website that’s independent of where it is hosted. Everything on my site is born, lives, and breathes in Markdown files in an Obsidian vault, published by Blot.
Last week I mentioned that it’s harder to some things in Blot (where my website is currently hosted) and easier to do others. Since then I’ve been weighing up where my priorities lie: are blogging or knowledge base features more important? The knowledge base side of things is where I’m heading, but man, it hurts to think of giving up the sweet aesthetic Blot provides!
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