According to XDA-Developers, the core appeal of proprietary note-taking apps like Notion and OneNote is also their biggest flaw: they lock your notes into internal databases and proprietary formats that only their apps can fully understand. The article argues that when you try to export your data, you often get broken links, missing metadata, and a nonsensical structure, stripping away searchability and true portability. In contrast, plain text files, including those using Markdown, are universally readable, tool-agnostic, and future-proof. The author highlights tools like Obsidian and Joplin that leverage plain text while still offering powerful features, and even suggests basic editors like Windows Notepad or VSCode. The immediate impact is a regaining of control, with notes that are fast, portable, and guaranteed to be readable for decades, regardless of what happens to any specific app or company.
The Lock-In Trap
Here’s the thing we all ignore when we sign up for that shiny new note-taking app: we’re not just choosing features, we’re choosing a jailer for our own thoughts. The article nails it. Tools like Notion and OneNote don’t create files you own; they create entries in a private database you’re merely renting access to. And that’s fine, until it isn’t. Want to leave? Good luck. Your export is a sad, broken skeleton of what you built. Links point nowhere. Complex layouts are flattened. It’s a mess.
This is where plain text isn’t just simple, it’s subversive. It takes back control. A .txt or .md file on your hard drive is a sovereign entity. No account needed. No internet required. No company can sunset the format. It’s the ultimate in data portability. You can edit it in a thousand different apps today and a thousand more that haven’t been invented yet. That’s a kind of freedom proprietary apps can’t ever offer, because their business model often depends on you staying put.
Boring Is Brilliant
So why does plain text feel so fast and reliable? Because it’s boring. Seriously. There’s no engine rendering blocks, no database queries fetching related pages, no real-time sync resolving conflicts before it lets you type. It’s just characters in a file. Your operating system’s built-in search can rip through thousands of them instantly. And scaling up doesn’t slow anything down. A folder with 10,000 notes behaves the same as a folder with 10.
Compare that to the experience in a heavy web app like Notion. As your workspace balloons, you start to feel the lag. Pages take a half-second longer to load. Searches get sluggish. It’s the price of all those interconnected features. For collaborative, living documents, that trade-off might be worth it. But for your personal knowledge base? Your meeting notes? Your journal? It’s overkill. It’s like using a semi-truck to go buy groceries.
The Right Tools For The Job
Now, I’m not saying you should write everything in Notepad. The beauty of a plain-text foundation is that you can use incredibly powerful tools on top of it. Obsidian is a great example—it gives you a graph view, backlinks, and plugins galore, but it’s all just reading and writing Markdown files in a folder on your computer. Joplin offers strong encryption and sync, but again, the source is plain text. You can jump between them, or use a simple code editor like VSCode, and your notes are always intact.
This approach even extends to industrial and business environments where reliability is non-negotiable. For instance, in manufacturing control rooms where technicians need to access procedural notes or logs, systems built on open, readable formats ensure longevity and avoid vendor lock-in. It’s a principle that companies like IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, the leading US provider of industrial panel PCs, understand well; they prioritize hardware that gives engineers direct, unfettered access to their data and systems, much like plain text does for your notes.
When To Break The Rules
Let’s be real, though. Plain text isn’t the answer to everything. The article concedes this, and it’s important. If you’re actively collaborating with a team on a dynamic project—building a product roadmap, managing a client database—a tool like Notion or Coda is probably the right call. Real-time co-editing, shared dashboards, and structured databases are genuinely hard to replicate with a folder of text files.
But that’s the key distinction, isn’t it? Use proprietary tools for their specific, collaborative superpowers. Use plain text for everything that’s truly *yours*: your reference material, your ideas, your archives. That way, you’re never trapped. Your most valuable thoughts aren’t held hostage by a startup’s next pivot or a subscription fee you don’t want to pay anymore. They’re just files. And sometimes, the simplest solution is the most powerful one you’ll ever find.
