A while back, I decided to tackle organizing my “cold storage” folder. Once I started digging, I found a bigger project than I was expecting. I had files from university and dozens of Scrivener archives, none of which I could open on my current Linux desktop.

My first goal was to get all of these files into a format I could work with. The .pages files from university were the simplest, because they had been automatically converted to folders. All I had to do was compress the folder into a .zip and change the extension to .pages, then import into my iCloud account. I exported these to .pdf and .txtfor long-term storage.

The Scrivener files had also been converted into folders and could be re-compressed in the same way, but I had no way to open them. Reddit came to the rescue with the recommendation for Lutris as a way to get Scrivener running temporarily.

Since none of these projects are in active development, I opted to export a copy to .txt for reference, and keep the .scriv files compressed to avoid the converted-to-folders issue going forward. At some point, I may return to Scrivener for my writing workflow, since I have not yet found anything that ticks all the same boxes, but I am testing out new tools at the moment.

All of this reinforced a decision I had unconsciously made a while ago: I prefer plain text documents for writing.

Plain text isn’t going anywhere. Markdown has been around since 2004 and is well-supported, and much of the software world relies on it for documentation. Even if Markdown did depreciate, .md files can be opened in anything that supports .txt and are human-readable.

Plain text also lends itself to versioning, which many writers have encountered in the form of “track changes” in Microsoft Word. Git is used heavily in software engineering for exactly this purpose, and can be used with plain text files easily. This website is managed through Git and Github, in fact, with blog posts written in Markdown. I have not yet implemented Git into my fiction-writing workflow, but I’ve considered it.

There’s also an argument to be made for plain text and HTML on the web, especially for emergency services that may need to be accessed when cell networks are unstable. I stumbled across a post from Hurricane Helene (archive link) that made this point directly.

The point is: I love plain text and get a lot of utility out of it. In terms of future-proofing, I think it’s the most likely to still be usable in a decade or two.