Less than a year ago I decided that everything should live as plain text files in folders somewhere on a nearby drive. Things that weren’t text could be managed in other folders and found via Spotlight. DEVONthink crashed a few times so I threw away the whole system and started over.

I’m beginning to doubt myself. Again.

The arguments for keeping everything in text files vary, but usually involve things like future-proofing, portability, edit-ability, simpleness, and so on. I fall for them every time.

The future-proofing argument goes something like, “No matter what computer I decide to use in 20 years, I’ll still be able to read my files.” I like this argument, and I use a version of it when arguing in favor of film photography. But I don’t believe that I won’t be able to read my PDFs or RTF files in 20 years. Even fancy editors such as Scrivener and Apple’s Pages store plain text or RTF somewhere in their files’ bundles, so even though it might take a bit of effort, the text is all there.

Text files are nice, and I loathe things like Pages or Word, as they lend themselves to endless fiddling with layout rather than content, but a little bold or emphasized text is nice once in a while, no? To that end, I’m back on with the dream team of DEVONthink, Tinderbox, TextEdit and newcomer VoodooPad. I’ll bet you in 20 years, whatever software or computer I’m using, the stuff I put in those apps today will still be around and readable.

Where does this leave my new favorite combination Notational Velocity and Simplenote? They’re still very much in play as the best setup for quick capture and syncing between all devices.

I’ll sum up how this all goes together some other time, but for now, I’m happy with my complex, incompatible, propietary set of tools that help me get my work done in a seriously sophisticated way.