Plain text is the universal interface. Every tool can read it, every language can parse it, and it survives decades without bit rot.
Markdown, man pages, RFC documents, source code — the most durable artifacts in computing are all plain text. When everything else decays, ASCII endures.
What I like most is not nostalgia, but mechanical sympathy. Plain text works with the grain of the machine: streams, pipes, diffs, compression, version control, search indexes, backups, and even corrupted-file recovery. When data is text, you can inspect it with twenty different tools and still understand what changed with your own eyes.
Why it keeps winning
Text has a low activation energy. You do not need a heavy runtime or a vendor-specific UI to open it. If a future tool disappears, your notes do not disappear with it. If a process breaks, text logs remain readable in a terminal. If a teammate joins late, they can grep the repo and catch up.
That portability is not just convenience; it is risk reduction. Teams often overestimate feature-rich formats and underestimate operational longevity. A fancy binary store can feel productive right now and still become an incident in three years.
A practical workflow
For knowledge work, I keep a tiny stack: markdown notes, newline-delimited logs, and simple scripts that transform one text file into another. This gives me reproducible output with almost no tooling friction. When I need structure, I add conventions inside text first, then automate later.
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