Plain Text Is a Love Letter

Plain text is a love letter to your future self because the future self is the only reader you cannot bribe with features. The format you choose today is the contract you mail forward — and plain text is the only contract that arrives unchanged. Everything richer is a wager that the renderer will still exist when you do.

That sentence is the entire essay; the rest is annotation. Steph Ango, CEO of Obsidian, named the same premise in July 2023. Three sentences from that essay have been pinned to a generation of note-takers: "In the fullness of time, the files you create are more important than the tools you use to create them. Apps are ephemeral, but your files have a chance to last."¹ Derek Sivers made the durable version of the same wager: "Every device, including ones long gone, and ones not invented yet, can read and edit plain text."² Jeff Huang's 2019 manifesto "This Page Is Designed to Last" extended the bet to a full-stack philosophy of web preservation.³ The Library of Congress's Sustainability of Digital Formats registry lists plain text in its highest preservation tier — universal tool support, no proprietary dependency.⁴ Different writers, different rooms, same bet on the same physics.

What most people believe about file formats

Most people believe the file format is plumbing — a detail their app handles, invisible until something breaks.⁵ Notion stores notes as JSON in a hosted database. Evernote stored them in .enex XML on its servers. Apple Notes stores them in a SQLite blob inside an opaque container. The format is the company's problem, until the company is your problem.

The premise is comforting and load-bearing for the entire SaaS-notes industry. It is also a misread of who owns the bet. Joel Spolsky, in his 2000 essay "Things You Should Never Do, Part I," gave the canonical engineering version: "It's harder to read code than to write it."⁶ Files behave the same way. It is harder to read a proprietary format ten years from now than it was to write into it today. The asymmetry is the entire pitch of the format your app picked for you.

Why the comforting story breaks

The comforting story breaks because the company behind your file format is not bound by your time horizon.⁷ Evernote was acquired by Bending Spoons in November 2022 and within roughly a year had cut the free plan to fifty notes and laid off most of its staff.⁸ One corporate decision became a multi-year inconvenience.

Notion took multi-day outages in February 2023 and February 2024.⁹ Roam Research raised its annual price from $165 to $500 in May 2024.¹⁰ The pattern is consistent. A hosted format means a third party owns the renewal terms of your reading.

The Library of Congress publishes a quietly devastating registry called Sustainability of Digital Formats that ranks file formats by long-term readability.⁴ Plain text — ASCII and UTF-8 — sits at the top. Proprietary office formats sit far lower; the registry names "format obsolescence" as the single greatest preservation risk for digital materials.¹¹ Roy Rosenzweig, in his foundational 2003 paper "Scarcity or Abundance?" warned historians that the digital past is more fragile than the paper one — durable carriers, open formats, and active migration are the only defenses.¹² The Internet Archive, which has preserved more than 866 billion web pages and 44 million books since 1996, treats file-format survival as the central engineering problem of long-term memory.¹³ When your notes live in a format that depends on a server, on a renderer, on a key kept in someone else's cloud, you are not the file's owner. You are its lessee.

Why plain text wins the long bet

Plain text wins the long bet because it has no dependency that can be revoked.¹ An ASCII file from 1971 opens cleanly today in every text editor on every platform.¹⁴ A UTF-8 file written tomorrow will open in 2046 for the same reason — the format is a public specification and no company owns the rendering pipeline.

Plain text is the only file format that has already passed a fifty-year survival test. Markdown, the lightweight formatting layer John Gruber and Aaron Swartz designed in 2004, sits on top of plain text without breaking the underlying contract.¹⁵ Gruber's original syntax page names the goal in one sentence: "A Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it's been marked up with tags or formatting instructions."¹⁶ CommonMark formalized the syntax in 2014, and GitHub Flavored Markdown extended it shortly after.¹⁷ As of mid-2026, markdown is the underlying note format of Obsidian, Bear, iA Writer, Logseq, Notable, MNMNOTE, and roughly every developer-facing static site generator in production. When Obsidian launched in May 2020, its Show HN earned 1,087 points on Hacker News in part because the headline was structurally honest: "A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files."¹⁸ The format was the feature. The app was a viewer over a contract that already existed.

Andy Matuschak's evergreen-notes practice is built on the same substrate; his notes live as Markdown files on disk and the practice could survive any specific tool that read them.¹⁹ The Local-First Software paper by Martin Kleppmann, Adam Wiggins, Peter van Hardenberg, and Mark McGranaghan — published at Onward! in 2019 — names "the long now" as one of the seven ideal properties of software you should entrust with your work.²⁰ The authors argue that data should "continue to be accessible indefinitely, even after the company that produced the software is gone."²⁰ The choice of file format is the choice of how long your work outlasts the company that helped you make it.

What regulators have started to notice

Regulators have started to notice that data portability is a structural property of fair markets.²¹ The European Union's Data Act, in force since 12 September 2025, requires that users of "connected products" be able to access and transfer their data in a "structured, commonly used and machine-readable format."²² Plain text is the trivial winner of that test.

The Data Act is the EU's most explicit move toward defaulting interoperability into law. Article 5 obligates data holders to make user data available "of the same quality as is available to the data holder" in that same machine-readable form.²³ The European Commission's Q&A guidance points to "open formats" and "non-proprietary standards" as the lowest-friction way to satisfy the obligation.²⁴ In the United States, the FTC's "click-to-cancel" rule of October 2024 attacked the cancellation friction layer of the same problem; the EU Data Act attacks the data layer.²⁵ In both cases the regulator has decided that lock-in is a market failure, not a feature. Plain text was already compliant with the policy the world is now writing into law.

The practice — what plain-text discipline looks like in 2026

Plain-text discipline in 2026 is small enough to start tonight. Choose a format any computer can read in fifty years. Store the files on a disk you control. Back them up to two locations. Refuse any tool that traps the formatted version away from the source.¹ Five rules follow.

1. Default to UTF-8 plain text or Markdown. UTF-8 is the W3C-recommended encoding for the web and the Library of Congress's "low risk" preservation tier; Markdown is the formatting layer that respects the contract.^{26 15}
2. One file per note. Date the filename. A filename like 2026-05-15-paper-notes.md is a self-describing artifact. It survives search, it survives sync, it survives any tool that opens text.
3. Back up to two physical locations and one cloud. The 3-2-1 rule formalized by Peter Krogh in The DAM Book — three copies, two media, one off-site — remains the floor of any serious data plan.²⁷
4. Avoid proprietary lock-in by default. Treat any tool that cannot export to standard markdown as borrowed software. Steph Ango's "File over app" rule applies in full.¹
5. Re-read your oldest file once a year. Open 2016-*.md and verify it still renders. If it does, the contract held. If it does not, your format is not what you thought it was.

These five moves contain no subscription, no migration plan, no AI service. They contain the willingness to pick a format and stay with it.

What plain text refuses to do

Honest balance is the price of being read. Plain text refuses to do several things rich formats handle well, and pretending otherwise is dishonest.²⁸ Spreadsheets, vector graphics, embedded video, real-time collaborative cursors, and cell-level computation all live more comfortably in formats designed for them. The argument here is narrower than total maximalism.

Plain text is for writing — the kind that survives being read aloud, copied into an email, pasted into a court filing thirty years from now. It is not the right substrate for the live calc model in your finance team's spreadsheet, or for the multi-user Figma file your design partner is editing this afternoon. Cal Newport, in Digital Minimalism, frames the broader principle: a tool earns its place in your life when its costs are smaller than the value it produces.²⁹ Plain text earns its place because the cost is near zero and the value compounds for decades. Other formats earn their place differently. The point is not zealotry; the writing, the part of your work that has to survive the longest, has a format that has already proven it can.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does "plain text" mean in 2026?

Plain text in 2026 means a file encoded in UTF-8 or ASCII, readable by any text editor on any operating system, with no proprietary headers, embedded objects, or rendering dependencies.²⁶ Markdown sits on top as a lightweight formatting layer that does not break the underlying contract.¹⁵ If you can read it in Notepad, vim, or cat, it is plain text.

Why does file format matter for a personal note?

It matters because the file outlives the company that designed the format around it.⁷ Evernote shifted plans, Roam Research tripled prices, Notion suffered multi-day outages — each event was a one-line corporate decision and a multi-year burden for the people who trusted the format.^{8 9 10} The format is the contract between today's writer and tomorrow's reader, including yourself.

Is Markdown plain text?

Markdown files are plain text with a lightweight syntax layered on top.¹⁵ John Gruber's 2004 specification states the goal directly: a Markdown document should "be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it's been marked up."¹⁶ Open a .md file in any editor and it reads like prose. The bytes are still yours to read forever.

What about images, math, and other non-text content?

Plain text does not embed binary content; it references it.¹⁵ Markdown carries image links via ![alt](image.png); the image lives as a separate file in a sibling folder. Math uses LaTeX strings that any compiler can render. The cost is one extra file per asset; the benefit is that nothing in your note becomes unreadable because a renderer was deprecated.

Does the EU Data Act actually require plain text?

The EU Data Act, in force since 12 September 2025, requires user data to be available "in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format."^{22 23} Plain text and Markdown are the simplest formats that satisfy the rule. The European Commission's Q&A guidance points to "open formats" and "non-proprietary standards" as the lowest-friction path to compliance.²⁴ Plain text is compliant by construction.

Will plain text really still be readable in 2076?

Plain text is the only file format that has passed a fifty-year survival test.¹⁴ ASCII was standardized in 1963 and ratified by ANSI in 1977. UTF-8, originally published as RFC 2279 in 1998 (current canonical spec RFC 3629, 2003), is now the default encoding for more than 98% of websites per W3Techs.³⁰ The Internet Archive's preservation methodology assumes plain text as baseline survivability.¹³

What happens if my note app shuts down?

If your notes are plain text on a disk you control, nothing happens — you keep reading them.¹ If your notes live inside a proprietary format, you depend on the company's export tool, its fidelity, and the time you have before service ends. The note-app enshittification cycle is largely the second story at speed.⁸

Does this look any different inside MNMNOTE?

It does not. MNMNOTE stores every note as Markdown locally in your browser, on your own device, and lets you export the set as .md files at any time. The product is a viewer over a format you already own. If MNMNOTE disappears tomorrow, the files remain plain text — readable in any .md-aware editor.

If plain text is a love letter to your future self, the only required postage is the willingness to pick the format and stop changing it. MNMNOTE (mnmnote.com) lives in your browser — markdown in, markdown out, no account, no install — for the writer who would rather mail the contract today.

Open the editor. Write the file. The future self will read it.

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