My mom never wanted power windows in her car. She was afraid that if she went off the road and landed in a river, the windows would short out and she would be trapped in the car. True story, that.

Mom’s semi-irrational fear reminds me of why so many people cling to using text files for everything instead of using something a bit more, well, useful. What if they end up upside down in a river? Or, (barely) more realistically, what if that fancy proprietary format becomes unsupported in the distant future? What if I change operating systems and the new one doesn’t run the right software?

Right.

I love plain text files and use them all the time, but they don’t display images very well. They can also be hard to read if presenting anything slightly complex. What about Markdown? I love Markdown too, but only as an easy way to generate something that actually looks good later.

It doesn’t seem like a good idea to sacrifice real and immediate usefulness so that I stand a better chance of surviving some imaginary computer apocalypse.

Anyway, in case of apocalypse, there’s always File->Export.

So I’ll continue to write and analyze notes in Tinderbox, store snippets of text, serial numbers, images, and PDFs in Yojimbo, and take meeting notes and brainstorm in MindManager or OmniOutliner.

I like not having to pull a muscle leaning across the front seat to roll down the passenger window.