Why I still write notes in plain text
(and probably always will)

In 2019 I moved everything into Notion. In 2021 I moved half of it back to Bear. In 2022 I tried Roam for three months, found it philosophically interesting but practically exhausting, and gave up. In 2023 I tried Logseq because it used local files. In early 2024 I had notes in four systems simultaneously, none of them talking to each other, and I lost a writeup I needed because I couldn't remember which app I'd used.

Since then I've kept everything in a directory of Markdown files, version-controlled with git, edited with whatever terminal I have open. I built Caspira to add the one thing that was genuinely missing: links between notes that actually resolve.

Here's what I've learned from that transition — what plain text gets right, what it gets wrong, and why I'm not going back.

The durability argument is real

This is the obvious one and I'm going to say it anyway because it's genuinely underrated. A .md file from 2019 opens in any editor on any computer right now without doing anything. A Notion export from 2019 opens too, but only if Notion's export format hasn't drifted, only if you exported it before you lost access, and only if the export was complete — which, in my experience, it usually wasn't.

There's a version of this argument that goes "what if Markdown dies" and that's not what I mean. I'm not betting on the Markdown spec. I'm betting on UTF-8 text files, which have been readable by every computer since before I was born and will be readable by whatever comes after the computers I'm using now.

git is a genuinely good sync and history tool

I resisted this for a long time because setting up git sync requires a small amount of infrastructure — a remote somewhere, a commit workflow. But once it's set up, it's extremely good. I have a complete history of every note I've ever written. I can see what I was thinking about in October 2023 by running git log --since="2023-10-01" --until="2023-11-01" --name-only. That kind of durable, queryable history is not something any of the note apps I've used have provided.

The sync story with multiple machines requires a small habit change — commit before you close the laptop, pull when you open it — but that's manageable. I've been doing it for over a year without notable conflicts.

Where plain text genuinely loses

Tables are annoying to write in Markdown. If I'm working with structured data, I use a spreadsheet and link to it from the note. That works well enough but it's a real friction point.

Embedding images requires managing files separately and updating paths manually. I've dealt with this by keeping an assets/ folder next to my notes and using relative paths, but it's fussier than dragging an image into a rich editor.

Mobile is genuinely worse. I use Working Copy to commit and iA Writer to edit on iOS, and it works, but it's a multi-app workflow where most note apps are one tap.

The apps keep getting better, and it doesn't matter

Obsidian has improved enormously since I last used it. I'm told the new canvas feature is good. Someone at work uses Bear with a plugin that handles wiki-links better than Caspira does for their use case. I believe all of this.

The reason it doesn't change my setup is that switching costs are high and the marginal benefit is now pretty small. With Caspira resolving links, the thing I actually missed about rich apps is gone. Everything else — the visual graph, the mobile app, the plugins — is nice but not worth the migration.

The best note-taking system is the one you'll still be using in ten years. Plain text has the highest probability of that being true.

I'm not saying plain text is right for everyone. If you process a lot of visual information, or you work primarily on mobile, or you find the friction of the terminal too high, a rich editor is probably the better trade. But if you're already comfortable in the terminal and you're not happy with your current note setup, this is worth trying before you buy another subscription.

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