On the aesthetics of plaintext

Plaintext is the most durable format I know. Files written in it thirty years ago open without complaint in any editor made this decade. They will open without complaint in editors that do not yet exist. Nothing else I work with can make that claim.

There is also something aesthetically satisfying about it — the constraint forces clarity. You cannot hide weak prose behind formatting. You cannot substitute visual hierarchy for actual structure. What you write has to carry itself.

The pipeline above is something I actually run on long drafts to spot overused words. It is four programs chained together, each doing one thing, none of them aware of the others. That composability is only possible because the format is plain.

I keep notes in plaintext, write drafts in plaintext, maintain lists in plaintext. The tools that process it are simple. The files are small. Search is instant and works everywhere. Version control is meaningful because diffs are readable.

Here is what a plaintext diff looks like versus a binary format:

-I keep notes in rich text, write drafts in Word, maintain lists in Excel.
+I keep notes in plaintext, write drafts in plaintext, maintain lists in plaintext.

I am not a purist. I use richer formats when they genuinely help. But I keep coming back to plaintext the way you keep coming back to a room with good light. It does not try to do anything extra. It is just there, ready, unambiguous.