Plain text is about as close as one can get while working on a computer to writing with pen on paper. The reason we ended up with so many ‘office’ software over time is because tech giants marketed plenty of features surrounding plain text, often under a convenient Graphical User Interface (GUI), as an enhancement over the simple act of writing. You could, the reasoning went, do so much more.

A side effect of this was proprietary formats. Uniquely organised files that were protected by intellectual property more than a lack of interoperability, which started building walls around our fun electronic gardens. Behind all this was subtext that nobody bothered to correct: people assumed these programmes were necessary because plain text could not do what those programmes did.

Plainly, this was false. But the purpose of PlainTextFiles.com is not to vilify proprietary formats or pretend that plain text can do it all or to claim that plain text is the supreme way of working. Rather its purpose is to coax you to think of plain text as a capable, robust working environment that can help you achieve lots more than you know and with many conveniences you never knew you needed. Proprietary formats have their place – do you expect to triage through your vacation photos on your text editor? (Besides Emacs fanatics who will probably find a way to do just that.)

So the next time you sit down at your computer to do something, before reaching to a word processor, ask yourself if perhaps plain text would be a simpler way of accomplishing whatever it is you are setting out to accomplish. You might just find a simple text editor is capable of far more than you gave it credit for. It might take some time and effort initially, but this website believes the rewards will far outweigh your efforts.