the modern textual archive format

Ideally, GitHub would understand rich formats

Its superior not because its faster, nor because there are shortcuts for you to do things, but because you can make shortcuts to do things.

Your task list is a plain text file, not some proprietary format owned by a company or locked to a specific application.

A simple and timeless format Plain text is the simplest file format there is. It will always be accessible, by some kind of application, forever.

Plaintext files are tiny, simple, quick to work with, editable by tons of great programs, searchable by all modern operating systems, easy to back up, perfect for versioning, trivial to sync between devices, and are amazingly flexible in their uses and formats.

In this system, plaintext files are used for most of the backbone of your organizational system.

made to work alongside the various plain-text, Dropbox syncing mobile notes apps such as Denote for Android and Jottings for iPhone from an app for the Ubuntu desktop. Plain text notes anywhere you want. Easily synced between your desktop and phone. Notes, plain and simple.

Future proofs your journal entries by saving them as plain text and organizing them as you go. This means you can read or create entries when you don’t have DayJournal.

It’s flexible in precisely the way so many modern apps aren’t, and if you like tweaking things until they’re just right, I can’t recommend it enough.

And if all else fails, you can just use a text editor.

The file contents should be human-readable without requiring any tools other than a plain text viewer or editor.

A user can manipulate the file contents in a plain text editor in sensible, expected ways. For example, a text editor that can sort lines alphabetically should be able to sort your task list in a meaningful way.

Plain text is software and operating system agnostic. It's searchable, portable, lightweight, and easily manipulated. It's unstructured. It works when someone else's web server is down or your Outlook .PST file is corrupt. There's no exporting and importing, no databases or tags or flags or stars or prioritizing or insert company name here-induced rules on what you can and can't do with it.