Plainly plain

Have you ever written a text in your editor, sent it to someone, only to have them reply "It looks weird" or even "I can't open that"? I'm sure you have.

Some formats like .docx of Microsoft Word fame can be opened in quite a few editors, but far from all. And the implementation is not always perfect, so the page might not render correctly and many features might not work.

And there are even worse offenders than .docx. If you use a Mac and the proprietary text editor Pages that comes with it, and tried sending a .pages document to someone on a Windows machine, then that person definitely couldn't open it.

This is because these formats exist for a very specific reason. The document is not only made up of text, but also all the formatting and features the program needs to keep track of. The formatting of the text is burned into the document. Chosen fonts, sizes, colors. And all these programs handle this differently. This means that your text, even if you haven’t spent any conscious time on the layout, and don't really care about font sizes, is locked to the editor you are using.

You are writing formatted text.

There is another way. Plain text. If you write and save your documents as such it can be opened in any word processor or text editor made in the last 50 years. And I can guarantee they will be readable in 50 years into the future as well.

This doesn't just make it easier to share files with others, it also increases…

Because if you make it easy to send files to others you also make it easy for yourself to switch between editors. Have a different one for the phone and the computer? One for work, one at home? It will just work if it's all in plain text. Your life is becoming easier as well.

And if you want to switch more permanently, it's worth thinking about…

Have you ever written 87 notes in a note taking app like Evernote only to find you'd rather try out Microsoft OneNote? Or perhaps another swanky new app you read about in a blog? What to do with your 87 notes? Well, be prepared to spend some time copying and pasting all your notes, because if you can't export them as plain text, you can't import them easily in another program.

I guess you should just be glad you only had 87 and not thousands of notes.

And therein lies the rub. The more you buy into the proprietary software and a system, the harder it is for you to leave. And leave you might want to do for a myriad reasons. Maybe the software stops being updated. Maybe they hike the price? Maybe the program is developed in a direction you don't like. Maybe it just stops working. The risk of losing access to your files is a present danger, but the chance is probably quite small. Most of the time you can do a controlled switch. But the mental block and effort required to switch just because you want to can be enough for you to stay.

If you write in plain text you never have to start over. Which is good because it gives you more time to think about…

Have you ever tried writing a piece of text and got distracted choosing the right font and font size instead of focusing on the words? Stop! That's procrastinating. At least if you want to write. If you are having fun practising being a designer, go for it. If not, you need to separate formatting from writing. And the best way to do that is writing in plain text. It's just text. Like if you wrote it on a piece of paper. At its most basic you can't even format it.

But if you think you will have to give up a well-structured document and a nice look just because you write in plain text, you need to dig deeper into…

Because there is a middle-ground that still counts as plain text. What you can and should do, is use special syntax that is part of the text. Several such markup languages exist, but a good place to start is trying Markdown. "What?" you say "Abandon Word and I have to learn a programming language?". Well. Yes. But you already do. You use exclamation marks to denote emphasis, you use question marks to instruct the reader that what you wrote is a question.

And this is the beauty of Markdown. You add tiny things like that in around your text. These small additions, in themselves, are quite readable and intuitive and their meaning can be understood by a reader without any explanation. Here are a few examples on how it is used:

*This text will be italicised*

This text will be bold

***This text will be both italicised and bold***

The amazing thing with this is that you just add these small notations as you write, and don't think twice about them. In the end, when you are ready to actually publish your text, you will see the next piece of magic because now you can really do…

When you export, those tiny instructions vanish, leaving behind just perfectly formatted text. Your resulting pdf, html or even, god forbid, .docx will render with the font you want to use, the line spacing you've chosen, and everything else that you set up in your export preset. See, this is where the last bit of formatting happens. Not in the text file.

So make one really great preset that really represents you, and use it for all your current and future texts until the end of time. But the opposite is also true, and just as valuable. Maybe you want to present your text in different media?

Fear not.

You can have more than one export preset. You probably want different sized headers on your web page and in a pdf. You might want to export a table of contents when you make a book out of a text, but not in your online version. You might want a sans serif font for screen use and a serif for print. There is no need to manage and keep several versions of your text for this. Just change preset when exporting. Write it plainly, once, beautify later.

One preset, several texts - or one text, several presets. Or both! For free! And speaking of free…

You should pay for what you use. This is not about being cheap. But sometimes we pay for proprietary software just because we think we have to. Because that's the brand we know. Sometimes a free alternative is as good (some would argue: better) than a famous proprietary one. But the main point to keep in mind when it comes to cost is the lifetime cost. Because it's one thing to pay for a software you love. That should be applauded. But if you buy something that uses a proprietary system, and you want to keep using your older files, you are stuck. You need to keep buying upgrades and new versions. Not because you love the software but because you need it. I beg you, don't make your lives work hang on a Microsoft Office-subscription.

If you write in plain text, there are many amazing free alternatives. And you can even jump between paid and free alternatives. And a little secret is that if you decide on plain text, it's not just text editors that can read your text but also other…

If you are a bit more computer savvy this is one of the big ones. This is where plain text becomes, so, so much more. Pretty much everything can read plain text. And edit plain text.

Want to change every occurrence of a certain word to another word in ten thousand documents with just a command? That's no problem with the command line program sed.

Do you want to be able to write "* TODO Certain Task" in the middle of any text file, not just in a special todo-program, and be able to filter out all these tasks from in the middle of your essays, spread over a myriad of files, into a single long todo list for you to act upon? There are programs that can do that. Or you can write your own. It only needs to search through all your files and look for that string. Oh, and it could also help you change them to "* DONE" if you want to.

Do you want an AI agent to keep track of all your personal writing and knowledge and documentation, but also be able to edit and change things that you ask of it? They can all read plain text.

When you are using plain text there is no end to the convoluted, complicated, personal workflows you can discover, build, copy or buy.

Or…