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Plain Markdown for the long run: open formats and OKF

August 8, 2026

Here’s a question I like asking about any piece of software that holds something important: what happens to it if the company behind it disappears? For notes apps, the honest answer is usually an export button and a proprietary format you’re hoping some other app can still read in ten years. That question is basically why Plainva exists, and it shapes a rule I hold onto more stubbornly than almost anything else in this project: there is nothing to export, because your notes were plain files the entire time.

Plain files, all the way down

Notes are Markdown with YAML frontmatter — the same thing you could open in Notepad, vim, or whatever exists in a decade that doesn’t exist yet. Databases are small, human-readable .base files, following an open, Obsidian-compatible convention instead of anything I invented myself. And because “plain files” is a promise I want to be able to prove, not just claim, I sat down and wrote out the actual on-disk contract in a File Format Reference — detailed enough that another tool, a script, or an AI with folder access could read and edit a vault correctly without Plainva ever being involved.

The only structure I let myself add

That structure is OKF — Open Knowledge Format, and it’s deliberately light: a type field, a version number, a few sensible index files. That small amount of structure is what lets databases, filters, templates and navigation work reliably, without needing a closed format to pull it off. Everything else stays exactly as boring as a text file should be.

Plenty of software is built so that leaving costs you something — your data, your history, your time. I wanted the opposite: leaving Plainva should be free, not as a favor I’m doing you, but because of what the format already is. If your notes can walk out the door whenever they want, staying becomes a choice instead of a trap. That’s the only deal I’d want for something I keep my own thinking in.

— Marco