Text Files Are Still the Answer

I used Evernote for more than ten years. It was my external brain. Meeting notes, project ideas, recipes, travel plans, random thoughts I wanted to capture—all of it went into Evernote.

And for a while, it was great. Fast capture, decent sync, available everywhere. The promise was simple: put your stuff here, we’ll keep it safe, you’ll have it forever.

Forever turned out to be about a decade.

The slow realization

It wasn’t one thing. No dramatic failure, no lost notes, no sudden shutdown. Just a gradual accumulation of friction.

The app got slower. The interface got cluttered with features I didn’t want. Pricing changed. The sync got flaky. New owners came in with new priorities. AI features appeared that I hadn’t asked for.

But the thing that finally got me was simpler: I realized I couldn’t actually use my notes the way I wanted to.

I wanted to grep them. I wanted to version control them. I wanted to write a script that processed them. I wanted to open them in whatever editor I felt like using that day. I wanted to know that if Evernote disappeared tomorrow, my notes would still be there, unchanged, readable.

None of that was possible. My notes weren’t files. They were database entries in a proprietary format, accessible only through Evernote’s apps and APIs. I had thousands of notes, and I didn’t really own any of them.

The export that wasn’t

Evernote has an export feature. You can get your notes out as .enex files, which is XML with embedded attachments. Technically open. Practically painful.

The formatting doesn’t survive cleanly. Internal links break. The organizational structure—notebooks and tags—comes out as metadata you’ll need to reconstruct yourself. Attachments are base64-encoded blobs you’ll need to extract.

I spent hours writing scripts to convert everything to Markdown. Hours I wouldn’t have needed if I’d just started with Markdown.

The migration worked, eventually. The notes live in Obsidian now—which is really just a fancy interface for a folder full of Markdown files. But the point was made clearly: I gave Evernote a decade of my notes, and getting them back cost me a weekend. If those notes had been text files from day one, the migration would have been mv notes/ new-location/.

The text file advantage

Here’s what I actually want from a notes system:

Durability. My notes from 2010 should still open in 2040. Text files I created in 1995 still open just fine. Can’t say the same for whatever format Lotus Notes was using.

Tool independence. I should be able to use any editor. Vim, VS Code, Zed, Obsidian, nano, cat—whatever fits the moment. The file is the interface.

Scriptability. I want to grep my notes. Find all TODOs across every file. Generate an index. Count words. Whatever I need. Text files work with every tool that already exists.

Version control. My notes can live in a git repo. I get history, branching, sync to any remote I want. For free. Using tools that already exist.

No lock-in. If I don’t like my current editor, I switch. The notes don’t care. They’re just files.

What actually works

Plain text isn’t just for notes. There are entire ecosystems built on the idea that text files are good enough.

Markdown for notes. Obsidian, Logseq, iA Writer—they’re all just fancy interfaces for folders full of Markdown files. When the app goes away, your vault stays.

Plain-text accounting. Ledger, hledger, beancount. Your entire financial history in text files you can grep, diff, and version control. Accountants may not understand, but your future self will.

Dotfiles. Your entire system configuration, portable across machines, tracked in git. No export feature required because there was never an import.

todo.txt. A format so simple it fits in a README. Works with any text editor. Dozens of apps support it. The format will outlive all of them.

Pass. Password management as GPG-encrypted text files in a git repo. Sounds crazy until you realize it’s been working fine for years.

The unexpected payoff

Here’s something I didn’t anticipate when I migrated: AI tools work great with my notes now.

I use Claude Code in the terminal. It can read files, search directories, and work with text. My Obsidian vault is just a folder of Markdown files, so Claude can grep through it, read specific notes, find connections I’d forgotten about, and help me draft new content based on old ideas.

No API integration. No plugin. No special Obsidian-to-AI bridge. Just a tool that reads files, pointed at a folder of text.

This wasn’t possible with Evernote. Even if an AI tool wanted to help me work with my notes, it would need Evernote’s permission, Evernote’s API, Evernote’s cooperation. My notes were behind a wall I didn’t control.

Text files don’t have walls. Any tool that can read files—now or twenty years from now—can work with them. I didn’t plan for AI assistants when I switched to Markdown. But because I chose an open format, they just work.

That’s the thing about simple, open formats. They’re compatible with tools that don’t exist yet.

The counterarguments

“But I need sync.” Use Syncthing. Use git. Use Dropbox. The sync layer is separate from the format. Text files don’t prevent sync—they just don’t require a specific vendor’s version of it.

“But I need collaboration.” So share a git repo. Or use something like HedgeDoc for real-time Markdown editing. The format doesn’t prevent collaboration.

“But I need mobile access.” Plenty of apps edit text files on phones. Obsidian has mobile apps. So does 1Writer, iA Writer, and dozens of others. The files are the same ones on your desktop.

“But plain text can’t do rich formatting.” Markdown gives you 90% of what you actually need. And when you do need an image, you link to it. The note stays greppable.

The real tradeoff

I’m not going to pretend there’s no cost. Plain text requires a little more setup. You have to choose a sync solution. You have to organize your own folder structure. There’s no onboarding wizard.

But that setup happens once. And then you’re done. Your notes are yours. Truly yours. Files on a disk that you control.

Proprietary systems front-load the convenience and back-load the cost. Text files do the opposite. A little friction now. Complete freedom later.

The lesson

Every few years, a new app promises to be the one place for all your stuff. The everything app. The second brain. Just put all your notes here and we’ll handle the rest.

Some of them are really good. Some of them last a long time. But “a long time” isn’t forever, and your notes should last forever.

Text files have been around for fifty years. They’ll be around for fifty more. The app that reads them might change. The files won’t.

I lost a decade to Evernote’s promise of convenience. My notes are Markdown now. They’ll still be readable when whatever replaces VS Code has itself been replaced.

That’s the answer. It’s boring. It works.

What’s your text-file workflow? I’m always curious how people organize their plaintext notes.