Your notes will outlive your notes app
Every note you write ends up in some format, whether or not you picked one. Markdown and plain text take about fifteen minutes to learn, and they turn the app you use into a detail you are allowed to change your mind about.
The app is temporary. The notes are not.
Try this. Open a note you wrote five years ago, right now, on the machine in front of you, without installing anything.
A lot of people can't, and it usually isn't because something dramatic happened. Apps get sold. A subscription lapses. The desktop version quietly stops being maintained. Or nothing happens at all and you just drift to something newer, leaving the old notes behind a login you stop typing.
The failure is rarely a company going dark overnight. It's that the notes were never files. They were rows in a database that one program knew how to read, and the export button handed back a folder of HTML with the formatting mangled and the attachments renamed to long strings of hex.
Plain text has no version of that story, because nothing sits between you and the words.
What plain text actually buys you
Skip the philosophy for a minute. Here is the practical list.
- It opens everywhere. Every operating system ships with something that reads a text file. So does every phone, every server you can log into, every code editor, every e-reader. There's no plausible future where that stops being true.
- The tools you already have work on it. Spotlight and
grepsearch it. Git tracks it line by line. Backup software handles it with no plugin. You stop depending on an app's search, because the one built into your computer already works. - It's small. Ten years of daily notes is a few megabytes. You could email yourself the whole archive.
- There's no export step, because there's nothing to export from. The file on disk is the note. Copying the folder is the backup.
- Other people can read it. People who've never heard of the app you used. You, in thirty years. Whoever ends up sorting through your files one day. That last one sounds melodramatic right up until you're the person doing the sorting.
Markdown is the part that makes plain text pleasant
Pure plain text has one real weakness. You lose structure, and everything ends up as an undifferentiated wall with no headings, no emphasis, and no way to say "this is a list" beyond typing dashes and hoping.
Markdown fixes that with a small set of conventions a computer can style and a human can read with nothing styling them at all. That's the entire idea, and it's why Markdown took hold where a dozen other lightweight formats didn't. John Gruber designed it so that a marked-up document would still read as an ordinary document rather than a page of tags.
So **important** still reads as emphasis in a terminal with no colors. # Heading still reads as a heading. Open a Word file in a text editor and you get a zip archive full of XML. Open a Markdown file and you get your note.
And it's about six things:
# A heading Some **bold** text, and some *italic* text. - a list item - another one [a link](https://smolpad.com), and some `inline code`.
That covers most of what most people write. You'll pick up the rest by osmosis, because Markdown is now the house format of GitHub, Reddit, Discord, most issue trackers, most static site generators, and every AI assistant that hands back formatted text.
The parts worth learning first
Headings do more for a note than anything else on this list. A note with three headings is navigable; the same note as one long block isn't.
The first line of a note becomes its title and its filename, so opening with a heading names the file for you. Rename the heading and the file follows. Press ⌥⌘O on the Mac, or tap the outline button, and every heading in the note lists down the side as a table of contents you can click.
Lists come next. A Markdown list is a line that starts with a dash, which is why one survives being pasted into an email, a chat window, or a commit message without turning into soup.
Return continues the list you're on. Press it on an empty item and the list ends. Numbered lists renumber themselves when you insert into the middle, so you never go back to fix 3, 4, 5.
Task lists are lists with a checkbox: - [ ] for open, - [x] for done. Plain enough to survive in any editor, structured enough that an app can make them tickable.
Tap or click the box to tick it, and the item strikes through. The file still just says - [x], which is the whole point.
Links are written [the words](the address). Backwards from what most people guess the first time, and permanent once it clicks.
Select some words and press ⌘L. If a web address is sitting on the clipboard, Smolpad drops it into the parentheses for you, so copying the URL first makes a link a single keystroke. ⌘B and ⌘I do bold and italic, and ⌘/ lists every shortcut there is.
Tags aren't in the Markdown spec at all. The #tag convention grew up alongside it and is now common enough that most notes apps read them, which makes it a safe thing to type into a file you expect to outlast the app.
A letter has to follow the hash. That's what keeps # Heading a heading and #2026 a number while #recipes becomes a tag you can tap to filter the list. Tags are just text in the file, so nothing is hidden and there's nothing extra to maintain.
Ask where the files live
Before committing to any notes app, ask it one question: can you open the folder?
In Smolpad the answer is yes. Every note is a .md file in your own iCloud Drive, visible in Files on the phone and in Finder on the Mac, named after the note's first line. Not a container the app can read and you can't. Dropbox instead, if you'd rather, with Pro.
Delete Smolpad tomorrow and the folder is still sitting there with everything in it. That isn't a promise about a company. It's a property of the format, which is the only kind of promise about your own data worth much.
Start smaller than you think
The temptation with plain text is to build a system first. A daily note template, a tag taxonomy, a linking scheme, a folder hierarchy planned out before there's anything to put in it. Skip all of that. Systems designed in advance of the notes tend to describe an imaginary person's work rather than yours.
Make a folder. Write notes in it. Put a heading at the top of each one. Add structure when a specific note becomes annoying to read, which is the only reliable signal that structure was ever needed.
The files will still be there when you change your mind about all of it.
Smolpad is a tiny Markdown editor for Mac, iPhone, and iPad. It lives in your Mac's menu bar, opens on a keystroke, and keeps every note as a plain .md file in your own iCloud or Dropbox. Free for your first ten notes, with every editing feature included.