Migrating to Plain-Text Notes from a Formatted Notes App

Quick answer

Migrating to plain text means exporting your notes out of the formatted app, converting the formatting you actually want to keep into Markdown syntax, and landing the files somewhere they'll stay plain text going forward — not just once, but every time you save.

This is a real switch, not a cosmetic one. Markdown's whole design goal is to stay readable as plain text, without looking marked up with tags — the file you write today is the file you can still open in ten years. And you're not locking into some personal dialect either: CommonMark gave Markdown an unambiguous spec that GitHub, Reddit, Stack Overflow, and Discord all adopted or built on, so a .md file written today opens cleanly almost everywhere. That's the case for why writers choose plain text over rich text in the first place. Migrating is just putting it into practice with notes you already have.

Below: the actual steps, the points where migrations usually snag, and what changes about your day-to-day workflow once it's done.

Step-by-step

Export from the formatted app

Most formatted notes apps have some export path — the specifics vary, but the shape doesn't. As one current example, Apple Notes added a direct Markdown export in iOS 26 and macOS Tahoe: open a note, tap Share, choose Export as Markdown, and the note's headings, links, and lists carry over as standard Markdown syntax rather than the app's internal formatting. Use the batch option where one exists — selecting a folder of notes and exporting all of them at once beats doing this note by note.

Convert formatting into Markdown syntax

Once you have plain text files, formatting becomes syntax instead of a menu. Headings become # and ##. Bold and italic become **bold** and *italic*. Bullet or numbered lists stay lists. Anything code-shaped — a command, a config snippet, a block of JSON — belongs in a fenced code block, not a styled paragraph.

Watch for the trap that quietly undoes the whole migration: importing a .md file into another app that converts it straight back into that app's own rich text on save. Apple Notes does exactly this on import — the file's Markdown syntax only survives outside the app, in the original `.md` file. If the destination doesn't keep files as real plain text at rest, you haven't left the formatted-notes problem. You've just changed which app owns it.

Decide what's actually worth migrating

Not every note needs the full conversion pass. The honest filter: would you be upset if this became unreadable someday? That's a real risk, not a hypothetical one. Evernote cut most of its staff in 2023, Google has discontinued more than 290 products over the years, and Notion can change its pricing overnight — and notes trapped in a proprietary format have no real exit besides a lossy export when that happens. Notes you'll want to search, edit, or trust in five years are the ones worth converting properly now.

Land the files somewhere durable

Don't dump everything into one flat export folder and call it done. Sort converted notes into files, projects, and tags as you go. It's much easier to organize during the move than to go back and impose structure on a pile of .md files later.

Common problems and fixes

"My notes look like a wall of text now." Plain text loses the visual formatting that used to carry structure — bold headers, colored highlights, indentation you added by eye. The fix is to rebuild that structure deliberately with real Markdown headings and lists, not to rely on how it happened to look. If you're capturing new notes as you migrate old ones, a plain-text note-taking system that separates capture from organizing gives you a repeatable shape to convert into, instead of reinventing it note by note.

"My attachments and images didn't come across." Exports usually pull attachments out as separate files rather than embedding them in the .md file itself. Treat attachment-heavy notes as their own migration pass, and re-link the files explicitly rather than assuming they followed along.

"Search feels worse than the old app." Usually it's the opposite once the tooling catches up — plain text is more searchable end to end, because a proper text search or grep-style tool can scan every file's actual content at once instead of relying on an app's internal index. If search feels worse right after migrating, the files are fine. The tool reading them just isn't indexing yet.

"Do I have to give up formatting entirely?" No, and you shouldn't feel like you do. Formatted notes' visual structure genuinely helps once an idea has matured past the capture stage — bold, headings, and nesting make dense, developed information faster to review. The fix isn't "never format anything." It's making plain text the default and adding structure with Markdown syntax when it earns its place, instead of accumulating formatting by accident.

Doing this with Carets

Carets is built around exactly this workflow — Markdown and plain text as the native format, not a rich-text database with export bolted on as an afterthought. Import a folder of the .md files you just exported, and they open as real Markdown, not a re-formatted copy of it.

Two things make the migration stick instead of drifting back into lock-in. First, files stay real .md on disk — nothing silently converts your notes into a proprietary format the way some rich-text apps do on import. Second, Carets organizes into files, projects, and tags, so the notes you just migrated get real structure instead of sitting in one long list. See tags vs. folders for picking a system that fits how you actually work.

Carets is available for iPhone, iPad, and Mac on the App Store.

Frequently Asked Questions

Will I lose my formatting when I move to plain text?

Visual formatting like colored highlights, custom fonts, and embedded rich media doesn't carry over — plain text only keeps structure you re-express in Markdown (headings, bold, lists, code). Most notes read just as clearly, or more clearly, once that's done deliberately instead of accumulated by accident.

What happens to file attachments and embedded images during migration?

Exports typically pull attachments out as separate files rather than embedding them in the .md file. Plan to re-link them explicitly, or decide up front which notes are text-only versus attachment-heavy and treat those as two different migration passes.

Do I have to migrate everything at once?

No — a partial migration is usually the more realistic path. Move active, frequently referenced notes first, leave a stable archive where it is, and pull older notes over only if you actually need to search or edit them again.

Is Markdown the same everywhere I go?

The core syntax — headings, bold, italics, lists, links — is consistent thanks to CommonMark, which most modern tools implement or extend. Flavor-specific features like task lists or tables can render differently across apps, so it's worth checking how your destination app handles those before you rely on them heavily.

Conclusion

Migrating to plain text is mostly a one-time effort: export, convert, and land the files somewhere they'll actually stay plain text. The payoff outlasts whatever app you're using today. Notes as .md files don't depend on any single company staying in business, staying priced the way it is, or staying interested in the product. Once the migration itself is done, the next decision is how to organize what you moved — not how to escape the format again.