Why I Write in Plain Text

In 2018 I tried to open a document I had written in 2009. I'd composed it in an app I loved at the time: clean interface, a satisfying full-screen mode, a little typewriter sound you could switch on. The company that made it no longer exists. The file format was theirs alone. When I double-clicked the file, my computer offered me a list of applications that might be willing to attempt it, the way a hospital offers you a list of specialists when nobody is quite sure what's wrong. None of them could. The words were in there somewhere, sealed in a coffin of proprietary markup, and I have not seen them since.

That afternoon I made a quiet decision I have not regretted once. I would write in plain text. Just text. The most boring, least exciting, least venture-funded format there is. The format that has no logo.

The format with no owner

A plain text file is a sequence of characters and almost nothing else. No hidden layer of formatting instructions, no embedded fonts, no licensing server it phones home to. You can open it in anything: the cheapest text editor, the most expensive one, a terminal, a phone, a piece of hardware that hasn't been invented yet. This sounds like a small virtue. It is actually the whole game.

Because the thing about software is that it dies, and it dies in a particular way. Not all at once, but by abandonment. The company gets acquired. The format changes. The subscription lapses and suddenly your own writing is behind a paywall you no longer hold the key to. Your words become a hostage to someone else's business model.¹ Plain text cannot be taken hostage. There is no business model. There is nobody to acquire.

Owning your words means owning the file, not renting the room they happen to be sitting in.

When people ask why I don't use the beautiful, expensive writing app everyone recommends, the honest answer is that I have been burned, and the burned learn to value dull things. I want my writing to outlive the tools I made it with. A .txt file from 1985 opens today without ceremony. I'm betting, and I think it's a safe bet, that a .txt file from today will open in 2056. I cannot say that about anything with a subscription button.

The freedom of a smaller room

There is a second reason, and it surprised me. Plain text made me write better, or at least think more clearly, and it did so by taking things away.

When you write in a rich application, the software is always quietly inviting you to do something other than write. You can change the font. You can adjust the margins. You can pick a theme. There is a whole machinery of fiddling available at all times, and fiddling feels like work without being work. It is the procrastination that most resembles diligence. I have spent genuine hours choosing a heading style for a document nobody would ever read but me.

Plain text removes the menu. You cannot make the font prettier because there is no font to make prettier. The only thing left to do is the thing you sat down to do, which is find the next true sentence. This is the part people underestimate: writing is not the transcription of thought, it is the method by which you discover what you think. A blank text file is a thinking instrument. Everything that distracts from the sentence is, in a real sense, distracting from the thought.

Markdown, which is plain text with a few light conventions for emphasis and structure, keeps even the structure honest. You signal a heading with a couple of characters and move on. The formatting is a note to your future self about meaning, not an afternoon spent in a styling panel.

What the constraint gave back:

• I write faster, because there is nothing to adjust.
• I edit more, because moving text around costs nothing.
• I trust the work more, because it isn't dressed up to look finished before it is.

Constraint gets a bad name. We talk about freedom as the absence of limits, but anyone who has stared at a blank page that could become anything knows that total freedom is mostly paralysis. The sonnet, the three-minute pop song, the haiku: these are not prisons. They are the walls that make a room feel like a place you can actually live. A plain text file is a small room, and I do my best thinking in small rooms.

What lasts

There is a tendency, when you've used a tool for years and grown loyal to it, to mistake the loyalty for an argument. I want to be careful about that. Plain text is not morally superior. It cannot lay out a magazine or track changes across a legal contract, and for those jobs you should reach for the heavy machinery built for them.

But for the thing I actually do, sitting down to drag an idea out of my head into a form I can examine, I have never found anything that beats a file that is nothing but the words. Fast to open. Impossible to lock. Light enough to carry through every operating system I'll ever use, and most that I won't.

The document I lost in 2009 was, I'm fairly sure, not very good. That isn't the point. The point is that I no longer get to decide. The tool decided for me when it died, and took my work down with it. I would rather be the one who decides what's worth keeping.

So I write in plain text, the files sit in a plain folder, and none of it phones home to anyone. It is the least impressive setup imaginable. It will still be readable when the impressive ones are long forgotten, which, when you think about it, is the only impressive thing a tool can really do.