Gabe Weatherhead at Macdrifter has highlighted a problem with writing in plain text and come up with a solution.
Working in plain text has some great benefits over using a word processor to write, just ask anyone who has tried to open a ten year old Word file or even worse a twenty five year old WordPerfect file. Then you get the problems of exporting your text to HTML for a blog post or some other format, try that in Word and see all the dreck it insists on inserting.
There is one thing that word processing does better than plain text. If you are working with a writing partner or editor how do they mark up your text?
Gabe has come up with a plain text markup solution that looks just the thing. Check out his blog post. CriticalMarkup has even been designed to work well with MarkDown, LaTex and HTML. He already has a decent set of tools for working with the markup format including a CLI tool and Keyboard Maestro macros.
The Macintosh Guy 