Markdown: the power of a simple format
While everything else accelerates, a 2004 format just took over. Markdown has barely changed in 22 years, and it became the lingua franca between humans and machines. History, reasons, and a benchmark of 7 tools to get started.
I have 4,000 Markdown notes on my disk. Yesterday, I opened the oldest one, from 2014. Two seconds to open. No login, no sync, in a basic text editor. My old Evernote, Pages or Word notes from the same era all need effort: find the right account, dig out an export, guess why the formatting is broken. The 2014 note just needed a double-click, because it was Markdown.
You probably use Markdown every day without realizing it. When ChatGPT replies with bold titles and lists, that's Markdown. When you read a README on GitHub, that's Markdown. When you write a Slack message with a bold word, that's Markdown. The format is 22 years old. It has barely evolved. And it just won.
Before explaining why, a quick reminder.
What is Markdown
Plain text. With a few conventions.
# A heading
## A sub-heading
A paragraph with one word in **bold** and another in *italic*.
A list:
- first item
- second item
And a [link to a site](https://cedricrittie.com).
That's it. You write it in any editor, with nothing to install. When you pass it through a tool that knows how to render it, # becomes a heading, ** becomes bold, [text](url) becomes a link. But the raw file stays readable to the naked eye. That's the foundational rule of the format, and that's what changes everything.
A history in a few dates
There's the paradox. While everything else thrashes, gets acquired, rebrands, ships dark mode, launches a breaking V2, the most boring text format in the world hasn't moved. And that's exactly why it won.
Why AI changed everything
LLMs were trained massively on Markdown.
GitHub, Stack Overflow, Reddit, tech blogs, open-source documentation: billions of tokens, all in Markdown. When you ask Claude or ChatGPT a question, the model replies in Markdown by default, because it's its native structural language.
Concretely, that means three things.
Your prompts are Markdown. When you write a prompt with headings, lists, bold to highlight what matters, the LLM reads the structure like a human would. A well-structured Markdown prompt produces a better-structured reply. Mechanical.
Context files are Markdown. CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, README.md, Claude Code Skills, ChatGPT custom instructions, Cursor system prompts. All Markdown. The format has become the de facto standard for briefing an AI.
Outputs are Markdown. When an LLM generates a doc, a brief, a memo, it's Markdown. You can paste it into Obsidian, GitHub, Notion (which converts), Slack, an email. No loss. No broken formatting.
Markdown has become the working format shared between you and the machines. If you write in another format, you take a detour every time.
Why it's perfect, even without AI
Four properties, in order of importance.
A .md file written in 2004 opens in 2026 in any editor. Word 2003 doesn't open the same way in Word 2025. Your Notion notes only exist as long as Notion exists. A Markdown file is ASCII. The oldest computing format still in use. It doesn't die.
You don't need the editor to understand the content. If Obsidian disappears tomorrow, your notes stay readable in TextEdit, Notepad, or even cat in a terminal. That's the file over app principle, theorized by Steph Ango (Obsidian's CEO): your files matter more than the app that displays them.
Git, diff, branches, history. You can track a text's evolution line by line, the way you track code. A text that's commented, shared, forked, merged. That's what makes a site like this one possible: every article is a .md file in Git. No equivalent in Word or Notion.
Pandoc, the swiss army knife of text format conversion, turns Markdown into Word, PDF, HTML, EPUB, LaTeX, Confluence, and 30 other formats. Write once, publish anywhere. This article was written in Markdown, rendered as HTML by Next.js, and also exists as RSS and as raw .txt at /llms-full.txt.
My setup
Obsidian, on Mac and iPhone. A folder called Nexus on my disk. Inside, around 4,000 .md files. Notes, meeting minutes, draft articles, contact cards, email drafts.
The folder is synced via Obsidian Sync (4 €/mo). It could be synced via iCloud, Dropbox, or Git. The format itself doesn't change.
When I want Claude Code to work on a text, I point the terminal at this folder. Claude reads the files directly, no conversion, no copy-paste, no API. When I want to give context to ChatGPT, I select, I paste. No broken formatting. When I want to publish on this blog, I copy a .md file into the site's Git repo. Same.
No export. No intermediate format. No migration. When I write a note, I'm already writing in the format everyone understands.
The tool benchmark
Markdown is a format, not an app. The app you choose changes the writing experience, but not the underlying file (unless you choose poorly, more on that). Here are the 7 tools worth a look.
Obsidian
The all-in-one. Your files stay yours.
Plugins extensible to infinity (1,800+). The most active community in PKM. For people who want to own their notes and tinker with their setup.
- Storage
- .md on your disk · local-first
- Price
- Free · Sync 4 €/mo · Publish 8 €/mo
- Devices
- Mac · Windows · Linux · iOS · Android
iA Writer
The minimalist, designed for long writing.
Not for managing a second brain. Zero distraction, careful typography, clean export. For essayists and authors.
- Storage
- .md on your disk · local-first
- Price
- 30 € Mac · 50 € Windows · 5 € iOS
- Devices
- Mac · Windows · iOS · Android
Logseq
The outliner for people who think in bullets.
Daily journal at the center, the rest builds around it. For people who like Roam but want to keep control of their files.
- Storage
- .md on your disk · local-first
- Price
- Free · Sync 5 €/mo (beta)
- Devices
- Mac · Windows · Linux · iOS · Android
Typora
The pure Markdown editor, no management.
No notes, no graph, no plugins. You open a file, you write, the rendering happens live. Perfect for occasional editing.
- Storage
- .md on your disk · local-first
- Price
- 15 € (one-time)
- Devices
- Mac · Windows · Linux
Bear
Light lock-inThe prettiest, but proprietary format.
You can export, but your files are not raw .md. Strong aesthetic, Apple-only.
- Storage
- .bear + SQLite (export possible)
- Price
- Free · Pro 3 €/mo · 30 €/yr
- Devices
- Mac · iOS
Roam Research
SaaSThe pioneer, but you rent your data.
Inventor of modern [[wikilinks]]. But proprietary SaaS database, no native .md files. Innovative and expensive.
- Storage
- Proprietary SaaS (JSON export)
- Price
- 15 €/mo · 165 €/yr · 500 € "Believer" 5 yr
- Devices
- Web · Mac · Windows
Notion
Not MarkdownBeautiful, collaborative, but max lock-in.
Notion is not Markdown. It's a SaaS database that accepts the syntax as input. Pick it for collaboration, not to store your second brain.
- Storage
- Proprietary SaaS
- Price
- Free · Plus 10 €/mo · Business 18 €/mo
- Devices
- Web · Mac · Windows · iOS · Android
The real question
The distinction that matters isn't price or app beauty. It's: are your files .md files on your disk, or not?
If yes (Obsidian, iA Writer, Logseq, Typora): your notes are yours. You can switch app tomorrow, import into another tool, open with a basic editor. No dependency.
If no (Bear, Roam, Notion, Apple Notes, Evernote): you're renting your notes from a vendor. The experience may be better in the app. But the day the app shuts down, raises prices, or loses quality, you have to export and migrate. And you always lose something in the process.
It's a risk calculation, not a moral rule. My 4,000 .md files can migrate to any tool in 30 seconds (a folder copy-paste). My old 800 Evernote notes took three evenings to migrate, with formatting losses and broken attachments.
The test to know where you stand: open an important note in the app you use today. Select all, copy, paste it into TextEdit. Can you read and understand it? You're already writing in Markdown or a clean text format. If not, you depend on your editor. And your editor depends on its vendor.
Markdown is 22 years old. Older than Twitter, older than the iPhone, older than Facebook. And it's the only structured text format that still works exactly the same way it did at launch. There's a reason.
The more the world thrashes, the more simplicity pays. The lifespan of your notes doesn't depend on the app, the vendor, or its business model. It depends on the format you write them in.
Appendix
Markdown cheat sheet
The 14 syntaxes you'll use 95% of the time. The rest is in the spec.
| Syntax | Render | Note |
|---|---|---|
# Heading |
Heading | 1 to 6 # for levels H1 to H6 |
**bold** |
bold | or __bold__ |
*italic* |
italic | or _italic_ |
~~strikethrough~~ |
GFM extension (GitHub Flavored) | |
[text](url) |
text | hyperlink |
 |
🖼 image | image (local path or URL) |
`code` |
code |
inline code (backticks) |
```python ... ``` |
code block | 3 backticks, language optional |
> quote |
quote | blockquote |
- item |
• item | or * or + |
1. item |
1. item | ordered list |
--- |
horizontal rule | |
| col | col | |
table | GFM, --- separator under header |
[[wikilink]] |
wikilink | extension in Obsidian, Roam, Logseq |