Every few years someone publishes a screenshot of a plain text file and a few thousand people share it approvingly. The file is usually a to-do list. It has no checkboxes, no due dates and no sync. What it has is the quality that the apps around it keep trying to design in and keep failing to: it gets out of the way.
This is not an argument for plain text. It is an argument for noticing what the plain text file is doing right, because the thing it is doing right is hard, and the apps that lose to it are usually losing on that one axis while winning on all the others.
Nothing to learn, nothing to forget
The file has no state you have to remember. There is no mode. There is no view that hides half of the list until you click something. When you open it tomorrow it will look exactly as it did when you closed it, and every action you know how to take on it, you already knew before you opened it.
Compare that to a product where the first week is spent learning where things are. That week is a loan the product takes out against your patience, and it repays it slowly — a few seconds saved per task, for as long as you keep using it. Most people default on the loan before the product breaks even. They call this churn and blame marketing.
A feature you have to learn is a feature the product is charging you for twice. from the notebook, March
The plain text file makes none of these promises, which is why it can keep all of them. Its only claim is that the letters you type will still be there. It turns out that is most of what people wanted.
What the winners actually do
The apps that beat the text file do not do it by adding capabilities. They do it by picking one promise the file cannot keep — it will be on your phone too, it will remind you, it will let two people edit it — and then keeping that promise with the same reliability the file keeps its own.
- Pick the one promise. Write it down. Refuse the second one for a year.
- Make the first minute look like the thousandth. No tour, no empty state with a mascot, no
Get startedbutton on something that has already started. - Make every action reversible, and say so once, quietly, where the action is.
None of this is a design system. It is closer to a temperament. The teams that have it tend to ship less and be forgiven more, which looks like luck from the outside and is not.
So when the screenshot goes around again next year, and it will, look past the file. The file is not the point. The point is that it has never once asked you for anything, and you have never once had to check.