The Plain-Text Canon (and Why Recipes Belong In It)

Notice which software people are still using — and still recommending — ten, fifteen, twenty years later. A surprising amount of it has one thing in common: it keeps your data in plain text files you can open in any editor.

That's not a coincidence. It's a quiet design philosophy that a certain kind of person keeps rediscovering, in domain after domain. Call it the plain-text canon.

The canon

Ledger and plain-text accounting. Your entire financial life in a text file you type by hand. It sounds masochistic until you try it — then you realize your books are something you can read, grep, diff, and still understand in a decade, long after any banking app has changed its export format three times. A whole family grew up around it: hledger, Beancount, and a devoted community who'll happily tell you why their money lives in a .journal file.

Obsidian. A note-taking app that became a phenomenon, and its core promise is almost subversive: your notes are just Markdown files in a folder on your disk. The app is wonderful, but it isn't a hostage situation. Delete Obsidian tomorrow and your notes are still right there, readable, yours. That single fact is most of why people trust it with a decade of thinking.

Org-mode and Markdown. Org-mode is the Emacs format that ate its users' entire lives — notes, tasks, agendas, calendars, half-written novels — all in one plain text format. Markdown took the same idea and made it universal: a formatting language so simple it reads fine even as raw text. Both won by being legible without the tool.

Git. The substrate under all of it. Git works its magic on plain text — it can show you exactly what changed between two versions, merge edits from two people, and travel back through years of history, because text is something it can actually reason about line by line. Plain text and version control are made for each other, and that pairing is why so much of the canon assumes you'll keep your files in a repo.

And around the edges: Jekyll and Hugo, which turned folders of Markdown into millions of websites. taskwarrior, which keeps your to-do list in a format you can script. The pattern repeats everywhere people care about keeping what they make.

What they have in common

Strip away the domains and the same principles show up every time:

  • You own the files. Not a row in someone's database — an actual file on your disk, with your name on it.
  • They outlive the app. Tools come and go; the files stay readable. The format is the contract, not the vendor.
  • They're future-proof. Plain text is the one format that has never needed migrating. A text file from 1990 still opens today.
  • They compose with everything. Search them with grep, sync them with anything, back them up however you like, edit them on any device, script them when you're feeling ambitious.
  • No lock-in. Leaving is never a project. Your data was never trapped, so there's nothing to escape.

It's a kind of respect for the person on the other side — an assumption that you might want your own data, on your own terms, for longer than the company plans to exist.

The one corner that got left behind

Money, notes, tasks, websites, code — all have their beloved plain-text home. And then there's the kitchen.

Recipes are some of the most personal data we keep. Your grandmother's handwriting, the dozen tweaks it took to get the bread right, the meal plan you actually cook from every week. And almost universally, they live trapped inside proprietary recipe apps — in databases you can't read, behind export buttons that give you a sad approximation, one acquisition away from disappearing.

Recipes deserve the same treatment as everything else worth keeping.

Recipes belong in the canon too

That's what Cooklang is. It's a plain-text format for recipes — a .cook file is just text, readable on its own, that happens to also know an ingredient from an instruction:

Crack @eggs{3} into a bowl and whisk with the @milk{200%ml}.

Heat the @butter{1%tbsp} in a #frying pan{} and cook for ~{2%minutes}.

Nothing exotic. You can read it, edit it in any editor, keep it in a git repo next to your notes and your ledger, search it, sync it, and still open it in twenty years. It sits comfortably next to Ledger and Obsidian and Markdown — the recipe member of the same family, built on the same respect for the idea that your data is yours.

The apps will get better, change hands, come and go. The files will still be there, still plain text, still readable. That's the whole point.

If your recipes have been stuck inside someone else's app, this is what it looks like to get them back.