I write everything in Markdown. Here is why.

I have lost notes to three different apps. One shut down, one moved everything behind a subscription, and one changed its format until my old notes rendered as junk. After the third time I stopped trusting note apps and moved everything to plain Markdown files, and it is one of the better workflow decisions I have made.

Markdown is plain text with a handful of extra characters. A pound sign makes a heading. Asterisks make bold. A dash makes a bullet. Underneath it is still a text file, and that is the entire point.

Plain text survives every app change

Every note I care about is a .md file in a folder now. My Security+ study notes. My eJPT lab notes. Meeting notes from my first client, a nail salon in Heber City. This blog post started life as a Markdown file and gets published as one.

Because they are plain text, I get things no note app ever gave me:

• I can search every note at once with one grep command.
• I can keep them in git, so I get a full history of every edit for free.
• I can open them on anything. VS Code on my desktop, Termux on my phone, Notepad if I am desperate.
• Backup is copying a folder. No export button, no waiting on a "download your data" request.

The file is mine. When your notes live inside someone's app, you are renting. The company can raise the rent, change the locks, or tear the building down, and I have had all three happen. A folder of text files does not care what happens to any company.

The whole syntax takes about ten minutes

People treat Markdown like a skill you have to go study. Here is most of it:

• # Heading and ## Smaller heading
• **bold** and *italic*
• - item for a bullet list, 1. item for a numbered one
• [link text](address) for a link
• > quote for a quoted line
• Backticks around text for inline code, three backticks for a code block
• --- on its own line for a divider

That covers 90 percent of what I type in a normal week. The rest I look up when I need it, same as everyone. After ten minutes of writing this way you stop thinking about the syntax, the same way you do not think about where the shift key is.

And because the marks are just characters, a Markdown file stays readable even when nothing renders it. A heading with a pound sign in front still reads as a heading in raw text. That is not true of a Word file opened in the wrong program.

Where Markdown falls short

I am not going to pretend it does everything, because it does not.

Complex tables are the big one. Markdown tables are drawn with pipes and dashes, and they are fine for three or four narrow columns. Past that they turn into a wall of punctuation that is miserable to edit. No merged cells, no column widths, no wrapping control. When I built a pricing sheet with more than a few rows, I gave up and used a spreadsheet, and that was the right call.

Print layout is the other one. Markdown has no concept of a page. No margins, no page breaks, no headers or footers. When a client needs a clean PDF, I convert the Markdown with a tool like Pandoc and still spend time fixing where things land. If the final product is a printed document, starting in a word processor is honestly less work.

Two smaller ones worth knowing. Images are just file paths, so moving an image breaks the reference. And there is no track changes or commenting, so going back and forth on a draft with a non-technical client is easier in a shared doc. I use the boring tools for those jobs and feel no guilt about it.

How to start today

Do not install a system and do not watch a tutorial. Make a folder called notes. Create a file called anything.md. Write in it. That is the whole setup. VS Code previews Markdown out of the box if you want to see it rendered, but you do not need the preview to work.

I wanted the same thing on my phone without signing up for another note service, so I built a Markdown notes tool into my own app. Aldo's Toolkit is free on both stores, no ads, no tracking, and your notes stay on your device. If you want to try writing this way, it is at /app.