Make you files free (as in freedom)

Nowadays, a lot of file formats we use are either proprietary or we don’t even know what a backend uses. Think about your notes, school assignments, presentations, Excel sheets etc. I’m mostly talking about notes here, because that’s the biggest thing I’ve changed, but there are a lot of proprietary file formats in our life nowadays. I’ve tried to change a few things in my life to move away from these formats.

Proprietary formats

Proprietary file formats aren’t inherently bad or evil. They’re just what they are: file formats. The problem with proprietary formats mostly is that they aren’t available everywhere, or you need to have certain apps installed to access them. I think that that is unnecessary for some apps. Besides, you can transfer some things quite easily.

That being said, open file formats aren’t a be-all end-all. They are very useful for some cases. Photoshop, for example uses the .psd format. This format is great for editing photos, keeping track of your layers and all other things you need to have a photo editor to keep track of. This is a very simple example of why you still can use proprietary file formats, even though open formats are quite great for some situations.

Plain text

One of the most open formats is a very simple one: plain text. This is just a .txt file. You can keep track of your grocery list, to-do list, notes, and a lot of other things with a simple text file. This can be quite limiting at times, and there are some better options that are also open.

My personal favourite one is markdown. It uses the .md extension and also enables you to style your text. Besides, the file is very readable, even without a markdown renderer. But wait, you said that the nice thing about open formats is that you don’t have to have a certain app to view them. Well, I lied… a bit. The thing with open file formats is that everyone can simply make an application to open that type of file. Take a look at this list of markdown editors and viewers. This list is vast, and way bigger than the amount of apps that can open Word documents for example. Besides, like I said, you can also read your files with a simple text viewer.

There are some other plain text formats that all have their own use case. For example: there are .tex files. These use something called LaTeX. It’s a format that’s widely used for research papers and a lot of students use it for their research and assignments. Another great format is .csv. It’s a simple format that uses , and ; to separate columns and rows like you would in Excel. You can also use special viewers to view CSV files, they are also very useful for modifications with code. If you’re looking for image formats, .svg is a great format to create vector graphics. You can also modify paths and colours with code.

All these formats have their own purposes and can come in handy in some situations. I think that using these formats can enhance your knowledge about things and support more open-source projects, which I love. That being said, you shouldn’t feel obligated to change your whole life to plain text. Sometimes, proprietary formats are just fine. But let’s just take a look at the software you can use to support all these file formats.

Software

I love markdown, this blog is written in Markdown, my notes are all in Markdown and I write all my recipes in Markdown. A great application to support markdown notes is Obsidian. This application can do a lot for you and some people even call it a second brain. If you want to try out some different markdown-based note-taking apps take a look at the following: Bear and Logseq. If you just want to view and edit markdown apps, check out the previous list of apps. Do note that bear and obsidian both aren’t open-source, unfortunately.

If you want to write more academic papers, check out Overleaf or TeXstudio. Both are open source and support LaTeX fully. Overleaf is used by universities all around the world to write academic papers and is a great online tool.

For CSV, you can use Excel or LibreOffice. These are both office apps, but LibreOffice is a fully open-source alternative to all Microsoft Office apps (and supports some more open document standards).

Lastly, the best application for vector graphics is definitely Inkscape. If you totally want to ride the open file formats train, also take a look at todo.txt.

The coolest thing about these file formats is highlighted in a video by No Boilerplate. Because all these files are plain text in some way, shape, or form you can also version them in a lot of different ways. The simplest way would to just use Git. You can all work on the same files, resolve conflicts in different ways and roll back to any version at any point. This is where the true power of open formats and plain text formats really shine.

While writing this post, I’m considering switching to some more open formats. I already use a lot of open-source software and some open formats. But, I still write my university assignments in Word and my spreadsheets are still in Excel. I started this blog post as a way to share how to create open and easily accessible notes with obsidian and some to-do lists with todo.txt. I found out about a lot more file formats, and I’m going to try to use some of them in the near future. I hope it also inspired you to use some more open formats.