Your Markdown files should stay on your Mac

Open a writing app you've used for a while and try to find one of your old notes in the Finder. A lot of the time, you can't. The text is in there somewhere, but it lives inside the app's library now, in a database or a private folder with a name you didn't choose. You wrote it. You're just not sure where it is.

A Markdown file is the most portable thing on your computer. It's plain text. It opens in anything, on any machine, in ten years. The moment an app pulls it into a library, you trade that portability for a tidier sidebar, usually without noticing, because the app asked nicely and the import was one click.

Unmarked doesn't ask for the trade. It opens the file where it already lives. You point it at notes/draft.md on your disk, and that is the file it reads. When you edit, it saves the changes back to that same file, in place. No import step, no copy tucked away in application support. The document you opened is the document you keep. Close the app and the file sits exactly where it was, named what you named it, in the folder you put it in.

Your files stay on your Mac because Unmarked is fully offline. There's no account to make, no sync to configure, and nothing of yours sitting on a server, ours included. If you want your files on your phone too, keep them in iCloud Drive or Dropbox and let those services do what they already do well. Unmarked just opens whatever's in front of it.

Plain text on your own disk is yours in a way a library never is. A library is convenient right up until the day you want to leave, or the company does. Your files were yours before you opened Unmarked, and they're still yours, in the same place, after you quit it. Keep them where you can find them.