I have used plenty of writing applications over the years. What increasingly matters to me is whether I can leave them again. Can I take my words elsewhere, open them with another tool and carry on working? Or does changing applications turn into a migration project?
That is why I am such a fan of Markdown (see https://markdown.org/ for more). An .md file is essentially plain text, with simple conventions for headings, links, lists and emphasis. I can open it in a dedicated writing application, a basic text editor or a terminal. The application can change. My words remain accessible.
That freedom was also the reason I started using Obsidian for notes and personal knowledge management. I came from Capacities.io, which I liked very much. But my files were in their cloud and I really wanted md as my standard format. Obsidian has many features that are very useful (like the graph), but the deciding factor was the foundation: Markdown files in folders I control. If another application suits me better tomorrow, I can “take my files with me”—although that really means leaving them exactly where they are, in Nextcloud, and pointing the new application to that location. My files stay put; I simply choose a different tool to work with them.
I have now taken that approach a step further. A script automatically creates a Markdown version of every DOCX and ODF document in my Nextcloud environment. The originals remain available, while the Markdown copies give me another way to search, process and reuse the text. Complex formatting may not survive the conversion perfectly, but for much of my writing, access to the content matters more than preserving the page layout.
There are practical advantages everywhere. Markdown files are small, easy to back up and usable offline. Ordinary search tools can read them. Scripts and locally running language models can process them. Publishing tools such as Hugo and Docsify can turn them into websites. The same text can move between different workflows without needing to be recreated each time.
Markdown does have different flavours. Tables, footnotes and application-specific features do not always travel perfectly. That is why I prefer to keep the underlying documents fairly simple. The fewer special additions I depend on, the more freedom I retain.
For me, this is what an open format should make possible: choosing my editor, choosing my storage and changing my mind. My files can live on my laptop, in my home network or with a hosting provider I select. They remain my files.
And that is also why Markdown feels like a foundation for the future. New applications and new ways of working can develop around it, while the text remains readable. Even if a favourite application disappears, I should still be able to open what I wrote. A heading marked with a hash sign may not look particularly revolutionary. But being able to keep decades of writing independent of the software used to create it? That is a future I would happily write myself into.