Markdown vs Rich Text: Why Writers Choose Plain Text

Quick answer

Markdown is a writing format: plain text you can read and edit in any text editor, with formatting shown as visible punctuation. Rich text formats like RTF or Word's .docx work the other way — they're publishing formats. HTML is a publishing format, Markdown is a writing format, and that distinction is basically the whole reason writers who care about speed, portability, and files that last end up choosing Markdown.

How it actually works

Markdown's syntax borrows from plain old email conventions. Asterisks around a word look like emphasis. A dash and a space look like a list item. Markdown's overriding design goal is readability — a .md file should be legible on its own, before anything renders it. A .docx or .rtf file isn't like that. It's functionally opaque until you open it in compatible software.

Rich text formats work the opposite way, and on purpose. RTF was never meant to be edited in a text editor — it's an interchange format for finished, formatted documents, with the actual formatting instructions encoded in a way humans aren't meant to read directly. That's a reasonable design if all you need is to move a formatted letter between two copies of Word. It's a worse fit for how most writing actually happens: draft, revise, reorganize, repeat.

Markdown's emphasis syntax gives you a feel for this right away — just a few characters, **bold**, _italic_, ~~strikethrough~~, and it reads clearly even before anything converts it.

When to use it (and when to skip it)

Reach for Markdown when you're drafting, taking notes, writing documentation, or keeping anything you'll want to search, diff, or move between apps later. It's honest about its limits too — Markdown isn't built for complex page layout, so a print brochure or a heavily designed one-pager is still better served by a dedicated layout tool.

Rich text breaks down more often than people expect, and quietly. Annotations, footnotes, and tables can silently disappear when an RTF or Word document crosses into an application that only implements part of the spec, because most word processors only support a subset of what the format technically allows. There's a size cost too: embedded images in RTF are Base16-encoded, which roughly doubles their size, and non-ASCII text takes up more space than it would in plain text.

Starting from a Word or Google Docs file and want a clean Markdown version instead? Converting Word and Google Docs files to Markdown with a tool like Pandoc strips the proprietary wrapper down to the actual structure — headings, emphasis, lists, links — without dragging the formatting cruft along with it.

The durability argument matters most over years, not days. Plain text's core value is independence from any single program's special encoding or format — a .md file opens the same way in any text editor, on any platform, indefinitely, while a proprietary format depends on that specific software sticking around. Markdown's own early history is proof the format can mature without losing that simplicity: differing implementations led to CommonMark's 2014 specification, which made Markdown render consistently across tools without changing what makes it legible as plain text in the first place. It's the same logic behind building a plain-text note-taking system instead of a database-locked one.

How Carets fits in

Carets is built around exactly this bet — that your writing should live in plain text, not inside a proprietary format you can't fully see or move. Every note, doc, and code snippet you write in Carets is Markdown or plain text on disk, so nothing about the file depends on Carets staying installed.

Two things make that practical day to day. First, Carets keeps everything organized into files, projects, and tags, so a growing library of Markdown notes doesn't turn into a flat folder of loose files — you get the structure of a rich text app without giving up the portability of plain text. Second, it's native and fast on iPhone, iPad, and Mac, not a web wrapper, so switching between a quick capture on your phone and a longer writing session on your Mac doesn't cost you speed or file fidelity.

If a document started life as Word or Google Docs prose, a quick pass through something like a throwaway plain-text scratch file in Carets is often enough to see what's actually worth keeping. Carets is available on the App Store for iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Markdown better than rich text for everyday writing?

For drafting and note-taking, most writers find Markdown faster and less distracting, because formatting stays inline as readable punctuation instead of hidden menus and toggles. Rich text editors still make sense for polished, layout-heavy documents meant for print or a single word processor. But for day-to-day writing, editing, and long-term storage, Markdown's plain-text foundation is the more durable choice.

Can I convert a Word or Google Docs file to Markdown?

Yes. Tools like Pandoc convert .docx files and Google Docs exports into clean Markdown, stripping proprietary formatting down to headings, emphasis, lists, and links. Complex tables or embedded objects usually need a bit of manual cleanup, but the conversion preserves the actual content and structure rather than the rich-text wrapper around it.

Will a Markdown file still open in 10 years?

Almost certainly, because Markdown files are plain text — readable by any text editor on any operating system, with no proprietary decoder required. Rich text and binary document formats depend on specific applications staying available and backward-compatible, which is a much less certain bet over a decade.