You might have noticed at this point that I have two main note storage formats: an analogic one based on a good notebook and a fountain pen, and “note files”.
Here’s the secret: note files, for me, are just text files.
I have a whole bunch of text files on my devices.
Here are 6 good reasons why I use text files instead of binary or online formats such as Word or Notion.
1. Text files are immortal
Suppose you find somewhere a file with extension “.123“. Assuming you’re old and geeky enough, you’ll recognize a Lotus 123 file.
Lotus 123 was the great-grandfather of Excel, back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and stuff happened on a 80×24 terminal, in like 1983.
Getting out the information stored in that file is going to be messy at least.
Compare that to a 1983 .txt file. A simple cat or opening it in your favourite text editor is all you need to start working on your childhood novel again.
There’s no text file format update, new version, software lock down. Text files don’t age.
2. Text files are universal
On a similar note, you can port your files all around. Mac? Linux? Windows? no problem. Android? Raspberry Pi? IPhone? Sure thing.
At work, I use a Mac. At home I most definitely don’t. I also have an iPhone and a tweaked weird Android-ish phone. And a number of odd bits and bobs running some versions of Unix at home.
They all can read and write text files no problem. That’s false of basically any other format.
3. Text files are local
I don’t want my personal information to be stored in some remote server I can’t control. I know for a fact that my employer would be very unhappy too, if I did that.
With text files, I can just store them locally on my device or devices, and easily synchronize across them only for things I’m cool moving around (e.g., no work stuff ever leaves my laptop).
4. Text files are easy
You can find a million and one tools to work on your files, and automate stuff with them.
Want to analyse the text to get some insight? Easy. Find all links in all your text file based notes and fetch them locally? No problem: a couple of greps and curls.
That’s a lot easy than doing stuff in VB Script or scripting stuff through APIs and database queries.
5. Text files are small
If you took the whole Library of Congress content and stored it in text files, you’d be looking at something like 45 terabytes of text.
You can buy 12 terabyte hard drives for 200 USD online.
You need 4. You can store the whole library of Congress text in 800 dollars worth (retail) of hard drives.
More realistically, you’ll have relatively small text files. That makes storage, moving and handling a breeze.
6. Text files are focused
There is an interesting mind shift I noticed, when moving to text only notes: most of the aesthetics become useless.
You focus on content and only very minimal, semantically relevant formatting. I find that liberating: no more time wasted on fonts, justification, page breaks, columns or anything like that.
That is so liberating.
Have I conviced you to try text files for your digital notes?