Daring Fireball: Yours Truly on The Vergecast: ‘# the Epic Story of Markdown’:

But the biggest reason for Markdown’s continuing success isn’t Markdown itself. It’s the triumph of plain text files, both for system configuration and for the interchange of human-readable (and thus, LLM-readable) prose. Markdown isn’t really a “syntax”. It’s a set of conventions for formatting plain text. If everyone agrees to the same basic conventions, plain text can be significantly more expressive than a string of unformatted characters.

I feel like almost everything I do the last several (~8?) years is in Markdown. But I think this quote captures why in a way that I often miss; it’s not the syntax of Markdown, it’s the freedom of working in plaintext. As crazy as my system is for managing productivity, it all works together beautifully, and that flexibility of almost everything being plaintext is the essential component that lets me use the best tool for every job.

Writing something longer on how I work across different text apps remains something I want to do.