There’s something clarifying about writing in a format that has no toolbar. Markdown strips away the surface-level decision-making — bold or italic, which heading size, what font — and forces the question back to what the sentence is actually doing.
I’ve been writing in plain text for years now. Everything from notes to long drafts lives in .md files, version-controlled, backed up, portable across every device and editor I’ll ever use. The format will still open in 2040.
The tradeoff is that rich media requires a bit more intention. Embedding a video or adding a caption to an image takes a line of HTML, not a drag-and-drop. I’ve come to see that friction as a feature. It slows me down enough to ask whether the thing I’m adding actually belongs there.
The best writing tools are the ones that disappear while you work.
I keep coming back to this idea. A tool that stays invisible is one you’ve stopped fighting with. For me, that’s a plain text file and a consistent publishing workflow. It might be something else entirely for you.