By committing to [[The Plain Text Life]], you lose out on some fancy features and pretty visuals, but what it buys you is incredible. ### Committing to plain text means: - Writing with [[Markdown]] rather than rich text - Building a productivity system that wholly resides within a folder on your computer - Avoiding single-software or single-vendor dependencies - Rejecting tools like [[Notion]], Trello, [[Jira]], and essentially all of Microsoft Office - Preferring [[Simplicity|simple]] file types, like [[CSV]] over [[Spreadsheet|Excel]] I recognize this is *not* a typical mindset. I'm not overly dogmatic about it[^1]. ### Super Powers - Your system will never go away. - [[Plain Text Durability]] is never-ending. - Most people cycle apps for this or that, and that cycling means starting from scratch each time. With plain text, you [[Build On Yourself|Don't start from scratch]]. - You never have to upgrade tools again. - If a better [[Obsidian]] comes along, my entire system and all its content can be immediately and painlessly moved. - You don't pay anything. - Plain text is free. There's a ton of applications you can use to work within it. [[VS Code]] and [[Obsidian]] are free. There will *always* be free applications to do anything you need to do with plain text files. It wouldn't even be difficult to make your own. - It's incredibly *fast* - Your entire system is on your machine. It's not making round trips to the cloud to do anything. - You can search the entire thing. You can even find & replace across the entire thing using tools like [[VS Code]].[^2] - [[Most digital artifacts are mostly scaffolding.]] - but plain text is *not*. Your files become all signal. They are smaller. They are more effective. A simple [[Raspberry Pi]] is more than enough horsepower to do anything with plaintext. - You do things **your way** - Your system is built exactly how *you* think it should operate. Markdown. files with [[Frontmatter]] can be used to do anything. - Your folder goes with you - There's dozens of ways to keep folders in sync across computers. If your system is just in a folder on your computer, it doesn't matter whose cloud-sync service you use. - You can use [[Git]] for extensive version history - If you want. It works great. - Your work becomes incredibly *modular* & easy to work with - By writing and storing everything in plain text, suddenly and immediately [[Large Language Models|LLMs]] can be given your content to operate with (see [[Retrieval Augmented Generation|RAG]]) - Tools for [[Static Site Generator|publishing folders of markdown files]] to the web are coming out all the time, and free. - This partly enabled by the fact that [[Plaintext is Stateless]] **** # More ## Source - self - Influence by https://youtu.be/WgV6M1LyfNY?si=c4kmK9zI0CTV-4SG - this video actually makes many of these points better than this note - Influenced by Mark WK [^1]: The [[PDW|Data Journal]] is a Google Sheets spreadsheet, for example... but one that I automatically save as [[CSV]] locally every week. [^2]: I've used VS Code to find & replace across my entire [[Obsidian]] vault multiple times. It's awesome.