Joshua Tonga

Every few years I migrate my notes. Evernote, then Bear, then Notion, then Obsidian. The migrations are always painful and always teach me the same thing: the only format that survives is the one with the fewest features.

Plain text has no features. That is its feature. A folder of .md files is something I’ll still be able to read in 2046, on hardware that does not yet exist, with software I have not yet installed. The same cannot be said of any database-backed app, no matter how lovingly designed.

I’m not a purist about it. I use a fancy editor. I use git. I sync with rsync and a cron job that I had to look up the syntax for, again, last Tuesday. But the underlying substance is just text. Just letters in a file.

There is a kind of relief in this. The relief of knowing that the thing you made is the thing that is saved.