My productivity app is a never-ending .txt file (2020)

I've been noticing lately, at least for myself, that useful technology stopped happening like 10-20 years ago. If all you could use was tech from 2000 and before you would have a pretty stable stack that just worked (without a monthly subscription.)

There is also this article today: https://jon.recoil.org/blog/2025/12/an-svg-is-all-you-need.h... about how great good ol' svg is. And then every recurring article about using RSS instead of all the other siloed products.

textfiles, makefiles, perl, php, rss, text based email, news groups, irc, icq, vim/emacs, sed, awk; all better than the crap they have spawned that is supposed to be "better".

Out of curiosity, what technology in the past 5 years do you use that you actually find better than something from 20 years ago?

I'd say Obsidian (just over five years old, since its first release), which is ironic because it's basically just a UI on top of text files.

I don't think it's better than org-mode, but org-mode is also post-2000 so doesn't count here. Obsidian isn't open source, isn't plain text enough, and is slow.

Markdown also falls outside the pre-2000 window as well. But, it's closely based on email and news conventions.