Two years ago I embarked on a challenge: to only access my digital notes with TextEdit and iA Writer on my #Mac. It was an enlightening and a frustrating experience!

Two days ago I decided to revisit the #plainTextExperiment by temporarily putting #Obsidian away again. What happened next taught me an important lesson about interoperability that I hadn't picked up the first time around.

#ptpl

Medium https://miscellaneplans.medium.com/the-3-levels-of-plain-text-productivity-and-why-level-2-is-the-sweet-spot-d7177122e4b1
Blog https://ellanew.com/2025/11/24/ptpl-183-the-3-levels-of-plain-text-productivity

I'm one week in to using One Big Text File #OBTF. It's a different kind of simple to the one-file-per-idea system I've been using (and haven't yet given up).

Personal experiment: Can OBTF be a worthy companion to my paper Bullet Journal? So far that's a firm yes, but one week isn't long enough to know for sure.

Looking forward to observing any friction in what's meant to be a frictionless approach.

#BulletJournal #bujo #PlainTextExperiment

From: @mikegrindle
https://indieweb.social/@mikegrindle/111886036108359427

I’ve started using the Plain Text Editor app by Sindre Sorhus, to display my weekly task plan.

What a beautifully simple #app this is! I love seeing the week ahead in a raw format that focuses me on the tasks, not on how pretty the #Markdown looks.

- Free
- Brain Dump mode (lets you type, but not delete)
- Word, character, and line count

The only feature I miss is a keyboard shortcut for shifting lines up and down. No big deal; I can always copy-paste.

#PlainTextExperiment #MacOS #Mac

#PlainTextExperiment update 4:

It's going very well, I suppose, because today I forgot I was even doing it!

I can see myself using TextEdit for super focused writing from time to time. #iAWriter is much closer to #Obsidian, except for how much it struggles with previewing multiple file embeds on one page.

I'd love to know if there's a way to make links active in edit mode! And being able to preview wikilinks without leaving the current doc, would solve almost every iA frustration.

#PlainTextExperiment day 2: today I continued using #iaWriter to access my PKM. I discovered the joys of split view on the Mac, which works really well for my workflow.

I also updated the scripts I'd written for Obsidian and made them work anywhere. I can even call them using #LaunchBar so for example I can type "che" into LaunchBar and it runs my checklist manager. A few keystrokes and I'm ready to use a checklist. So far, this new setup has been brilliant and I don't miss Obsidian at all.

#PlainTextExperiment day 1: Inspired by @ellane, I'm trying to use my PKM without Obsidian. I'm using #iaWriter as my editor of choice...eventually I might switch to #vim but for now IA Writer is working well.

I got the "Insert Current Time" shortcut working for my time logging, and have setup the app to quickly access the key parts of my PKM. I still need to figure out how to handle checklists and my daily templates, but so far I'm loving the simplicity of this approach.

#PlainTextExperiment update 3:

I’ve *kind of* been cheating. I’m not using Obsidian to interact with my notes per se, but I am relying on it for my French language learning flashcards. The Spaced Repetition plugin is the one I’d miss the most, it seems!

If that plugin were to disappear, I could use folders to take its place: hard, good, easy, revising the difficult ones more often.

This is actually an awesome insight that I don’t think I’d have come up with without this experiment!

In this article I've written about how I track my #health in #obsidian using the Tracker plugin *but not relying on it*.

These are the kinds of simple digital workflows I love the best. Even this week, during my #PlainTextExperiment , I'm keeping up with it just fine. Pretty formatting is nice, but it's not essential!

Paid post on my blog: https://www.blog.plaintextpaperless.com/p/how-to-make-a-simple-health-log-in-obsidian

For Medium members: https://medium.com/@miscellaneplans/how-to-make-a-simple-health-log-in-obsidian-3e43cb0810c0

Free access, for everyone else: https://miscellaneplans.medium.com/how-to-make-a-simple-health-log-in-obsidian-3e43cb0810c0?sk=53e1cfd37813f562938be9c56c950ec6

#ObsidianMD