Write plain text files

I write a lot of markdown files. Almost all my writings are on text plain markdown files.

Wait until this person hears about Markdown.

> Every few years a new company says you should use their special format. You have to pay them a monthly fee to use it — or keep all of your documents in their care. [...] When you store your writing in one company’s unique format, then you need that program to access it. Then the economy takes a turn, they go out of business, and your work is trapped in an unusable format.

This is something I've been dealing with lately. I have over a decade's worth of important personal and work files in proprietary formats, since I used Windows and Adobe's stuff for a long time. These days I'm using Linux exclusively, so my only option to read many of those formats is to hope that things like GIMP and Inkscape are able to open them somewhat accurately. All the documents I created in InDesign are as good as gone. I still have the files, but they're locked behind proprietary software that I couldn't use even if I wanted to. Oh, well...

For creating documents I've been learning LaTeX, and for note-taking I quite like Vimwiki[1]. I don't do nearly as much graphics work as I used to, though I appreciate things like the fact that Inkscape uses plain SVG by default. I'd rather not be locked out of my own files again in the future.

[1] https://vimwiki.github.io/

I think of it as "content and presentation should be as independent as possible". This is the content side: don't bother with fancy unreadable formats.

I've been thinking about this as I try to think about my own personal website. I'd like to have my content versioned, but, was really not loving the idea of tying myself to even a static website generator.

This is where I still ponder an approach more like antora (https://antora.org), where you can have a "doc repo" vs a "site repository". Thus, the concept of a version is really obvious.

I've also recently reorganized my professional notes into... a git repo that is only structured markdown files, one file per day, organized by year/month. And... it just works great.

My personal mantra is to use software/formats/etc that have been around at least as long as what you intend your content to last. Been there, been burned before...