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My notes app is a folder

After a year of bouncing between note apps, I came back to a folder of plain Markdown files.

Contents
  1. What I gained
  2. What I lost
  3. The honest version

For a year I bounced between Notion, Obsidian, Bear, Apple Notes, and a half-built thing I wrote myself. I came back to a folder of plain Markdown files on iCloud Drive.

What I gained#

Search is grep. Backup is git. Sync is whatever filesystem the OS gives me. When a tool I used to like changed its pricing or its sync model or its default sort order, I noticed it as a small ripple. Now nothing ripples.

What I lost#

Some affordances. No backlinks unless I write them. No daily-note template unless I touch-create the file. No graph view. I have not missed any of it.

The honest version#

The folder is not minimalism. It is debt avoidance. Every note tool I tried had a future version of itself that I would have had to migrate from. A folder of .md files has no future version.

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