Before I begin, let’s chat nerd-to-nerd to establish a base-line. As a geek, working in text files containing code, you are good at working with text files; piping them, grepping them, and changing them with both editors and scripts. Boring old text files are a good medium for storing my tasks and projects.

Over a dozen years ago, when I first started collecting text-based notes, I jumped on Gruber’s Markdown format, and used that for years. But Emacs started shipping with a package called Org (also called, org-mode), which, like Markdown, was a text-formatted style, but had a lot of special commands and features in Emacs. I wrote a script to convert all my Markdown files into org-mode, and have never looked back.

While the raw format of org-mode files isn’t as readable as markdown, within Emacs, I have customized my system (go fig) to look like a word processor. Not only is text formatting rendered in other font faces, hyperlinks show as a blue, underlined font, you can click or select to follow the link to a web site or another file on the system.

However, another advantage of a text-based solution is that you own your data. Sure, you can probably export your data from a third-party service like Evernote or Jira, but you’re still dependent on their EULAs, SLAs and whims. Sure, I’ve used file synchronization services like Dropbox, but you can move to Syncthing or any other service with a lot less effort.

Enough background. Thanks for putting up with my preaching the gospel of text.