I’ve been using plain text (.txt) files for taking quick jots, making rough notes on topics I study, and recently started using it for Todo too because why not!

Plain text apps, mostly notepad on Windows is super fast to load and it’s pretty much complete too, in the sense that it requires nothing else to work with. Every operating system has a text editor available by default. Once you open it, you can get started to writing right away without wasting any time in creating a note/notebook/etc…

The use case varies, obviously. For my use case, a couple plain text files placed in a folder suffice. If I need to make notes, I usually put them in sub-folders.

I have used some “specialised” apps for this in the past, namely Notion and Evernote, but nothing beats the simplicity of a .txt file. The non-cluttered user interface is totally distraction free unlike any other.

An even better approach

One can argue that a better approch to plain text files is Markdown, and for the most part, I tend to agree. Markdown looks good after rendering it in a browser, but not so much while editing. I use StackEdit inorder to edit and preview markdown side-by-side in the browser itself.

ReStructuredText (.rst) can be used too. Alternatively you can write your own format and a little custom parser to parse it!

Caveats

Synchronization is an issue. To get those files on all of the devices is important. Placing them in a git folder can do the trick and it can give you a history of all your edits too.

Further Reading

Over time, I’ve read a lot of blogs posts about people using plain text as their daily drivers, some of which I have found and linked below:

Some cool plain text and Markdown projects: