There is a long running joke in engineering culture about the holy war between text editors. Vim versus Emacs is often presented as a relic from the late twentieth century, a time when personal computing felt smaller, more intimate, and more ideological. The jokes reduce it to muscle memory and keyboard shortcuts, as if the passion could be explained by habit alone.
Yet the persistence of this conflict suggests something deeper. These editors are built around plain text, minimal interfaces, and a refusal of visual comfort. In theory, they should invite calm. Instead, they provoke intensity. What looks like a dispute over software is better understood as a dispute over how thought itself should move.
This is the first paradox worth noticing. The closer a tool comes to the raw act of thinking through language, the more fiercely it is defended. Simplicity does not dissolve attachment. It often intensifies it.
Plain Text as an Ideal, Not a Neutral Reality
Plain text occupies a special place in modern intellectual culture. It is described not only as a format, but as a stance. Plain text is durable, portable, and resistant to obsolescence. It promises independence from platforms and vendors. To choose plain text is to choose continuity over novelty.
That promise is real. A text file written decades ago remains readable today. It can survive migrations that would destroy more elaborate formats. In that sense, plain text feels like a small safeguard against forgetting.
But ideals shift when they become lived practice. As soon as plain text becomes a daily environment rather than a principle, it acquires habits, conventions, and dependencies. Org mode files may technically be text, but the thinking they support is shaped by folding, agenda views, capture flows, and internal grammars that only truly come alive inside Emacs. Vim users insist on neutrality, yet their thinking speed is inseparable from modal editing and embodied memory.
The file remains neutral. The cognition does not.
This is not a failure of plain text. It is a reminder that neutrality at the storage level does not imply neutrality at the level of experience. Tools shape attention, and attention shapes thought.
Open Ended Surfaces and the Protection of Incompleteness
A more useful distinction than simple versus complex is open ended versus closed ended. This distinction explains why plain text continues to attract thinkers even as richer tools become available.
Open ended surfaces do not demand resolution. They tolerate incompleteness. Pen and paper remain powerful precisely because they refuse to ask where the thought is going. A sentence can trail off. A margin note can contradict the main text. A crossed out word still exists.
Plain text editors preserve much of this quality. They do not insist on correctness. They allow repetition, hesitation, and contradiction to coexist. Half formed ideas can remain half formed without penalty.
This tolerance matters more than it appears. Thinking rarely begins with clarity. It begins with fragments and intuitions that do not yet know their own shape. Any surface that demands early coherence risks distorting the thought before it has had time to settle.
From Holy Wars to Defaults
For a time, it seemed as though these conflicts had faded. Editors like Atom and later VS Code arrived with friendlier interfaces, strong defaults, and extensible ecosystems. The emphasis shifted from ideology to productivity. Many engineers stopped choosing an editor and simply accepted one.
This felt like resolution, but it was closer to normalization. Complexity did not disappear. It was hidden behind extensions and conventions. VS Code succeeded not because it was neutral, but because it reduced the need for philosophical commitment. It allowed people to think without thinking about the tool.
That calm mattered. It created a generation of users who were less invested in editors as identities. Yet it also set the stage for the next disruption.
Closed Ended Tools and the Pressure of Finish
Resistance to tools like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint is often misunderstood as elitism or nostalgia. In reality, it has little to do with quality. These tools are extraordinarily effective at what they are designed to do.
The issue lies in their assumptions. Word assumes a finished document. PowerPoint assumes a distilled message. Excel assumes a model that produces interpretable outputs. These assumptions are not wrong, but they are late stage.
When used early, these tools introduce a quiet pressure toward closure. Fonts must be chosen. Layouts must align. Cells must contain valid values. Slides must make sense to others. Attention drifts toward formatting rather than meaning. Cosmetic decisions begin to steer thought.
As a result, many people instinctively separate their work. They think elsewhere and only later translate their ideas into Office formats. This is not inefficiency. It is an intuitive defense of cognitive space.
Markdown and the Return of Layered Simplicity
Markdown was supposed to resolve this tension. It offered readability without tooling, structure without rigidity. It promised a middle path between raw text and heavy formatting.
And yet, almost immediately, layers formed. Editors like iA Writer emphasized focus and typographic calm. Bear introduced tagging as a primary organizing principle. Typora made formatting disappear into live preview. Each tool remained technically simple, yet each expressed a distinct philosophy of writing.
Markdown stayed minimal. Human preference did not.
This pattern reveals something important. Simplicity at the format level does not eliminate complexity at the experience level. It relocates it.
PKM as a Mirror of Values
Personal knowledge management systems made these tensions visible again. Tools like Obsidian and Notion are not merely note taking apps. They are reflections of different assumptions about thinking.
Obsidian emphasizes files, links, and local ownership. It inherits much of the plain text lineage, even when layered with plugins and graphs. Notion emphasizes structure, databases, and collaboration. It prioritizes legibility and coordination over raw flexibility.
Both can be used thoughtfully. Both can become rigid. The debate between them is not about features. It is about where thinking should live and when it should become presentable.
Once again, a neutral substrate becomes a site of meaning.
Dialogue Returns in an Unexpected Form
Against this background, the rise of AI powered editors such as Cursor, Antigravity, and Zed reopens the question at a deeper level. These tools are not just editors with features. They challenge assumptions about authorship and agency.
When AI is encountered as a dialogue partner rather than an optimization layer, it unexpectedly restores open endedness. Partial thoughts are welcomed. Errors are tolerated. Revision is expected. Meaning emerges through exchange rather than execution.
This feels natural because it resembles how thinking has always worked in conversation. In this sense, genuine AI dialogue behaves less like Word and more like a notebook. Language remains the interface. Closure is delayed.
But this openness is fragile. When AI is embedded as autocomplete or instant correction, it reinforces closed ended behavior. The difference lies not in intelligence, but in posture. Interlocutor versus finisher remains a meaningful distinction.
How Humans Rebuild Complexity Around Simplicity
At this point, another paradox becomes clear. Even when tools are open ended and minimal, humans rebuild complexity around them. Markdown acquires orthodoxies. PKM systems acquire hierarchies. Editors acquire moral weight.
Conflict does not arise because tools are complex. It arises because tools become symbolic. Open systems invite projection. Projection invites identity. Identity invites defense.
The holy war returns, not because simplicity failed, but because meaning was added.
Staying Open Without Becoming Rigid
Recognizing this tendency does not require abandoning open ended tools. It requires humility about what tools can and cannot do.
Plain text does not guarantee freedom. It only delays enclosure. Open surfaces do not eliminate dogma. They merely make it easier to forget it is forming.
The attraction of plain text was never about purity. It was about protecting a space where uncertainty could exist without apology. Pen and paper did this quietly. Plain text extended it digitally. Dialogue with AI now offers another version of the same promise.
But none of these absolve us from our own habits. We will always be tempted to turn freedom into factions and simplicity into ideology.
Perhaps the most sustainable stance is not devotion or rejection, but remembrance. Tools are scaffolding for thought, not proofs of it. Open ended systems are invitations, not guarantees.
Thinking needs time before it needs form. Allowing that delay, and noticing when we stop allowing it, may be the most important practice of all.
Image: StockCake
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