Plain text outlives the app

Most people have a document somewhere that they can no longer open. The program that made it was discontinued, or the company behind it closed, or the format changed and the old version was left behind. The work is still on the disk and it is out of reach.

A format with no owner

A plain text file is a sequence of characters and nothing more. It has no hidden structure and belongs to no company. Every operating system can open it, and any future one will be able to as well.

That makes text a safe place to keep anything you expect to want in ten years: notes, drafts, records, the articles on a site like this one.

Structure without lock-in

Plain does not have to mean unformatted. Markdown adds headings, lists, links and emphasis using ordinary characters, so a file reads well even when nothing is rendering it.

## A heading

Some text with a [link](https://example.com) and a *stressed* word.

If the tool that turns this into a web page disappears, the file is still a perfectly legible document.

What you give up

Text files do not offer live collaboration, comments in the margin or complicated layout. For work that depends on those, a dedicated application is the better choice.

The useful distinction is between where work happens and where it is kept. It is reasonable to draft in whatever tool is most comfortable. It is wise to store the finished thing in a form that does not need that tool to exist.

The test

Ask of anything you care about: could I read this with the simplest program on the machine? If the answer is yes, it will probably still be readable long after the software you wrote it in is gone.