I've been going back and forth between markdown and rich text editors for probably seven or eight years now. I've written documentation in both, blog posts in both, even tried writing a book in Google Docs once (that was a mistake). Here's what I've figured out.

The Case for Rich Text

Let's start with the obvious one because it's what most people use. Google Docs, Microsoft Word, Notion — these are rich text editors. You click buttons, you see formatting instantly, you never think about syntax.

If you're collaborating with non-technical people, rich text is basically your only option. Try asking a marketing person to review a pull request with markdown changes and see how that goes. They want to highlight text, click "bold," and see it go bold. Nothing wrong with that.

Rich text editors are also better when you need precise control over layout. If you're designing a newsletter or formatting a resume, markdown's limited styling options will frustrate you. You can't set custom margins, change font sizes per element, or create multi-column layouts in standard markdown. You just can't.

But here's the thing — for anything that isn't heavily design-oriented, rich text editors introduce a bunch of problems that people don't talk about enough.

The formatting gets messy. Copy text from a Google Doc into a CMS and you'll get random span tags, inline styles, and weird character encoding. I've had Google Docs paste extra whitespace, merge paragraphs I didn't want merged, and strip out code formatting entirely. Every rich text editor has its own internal representation of formatting, and they don't play nice with each other.

Where Markdown Wins

Markdown is plain text with conventions. That's it. A # at the start of a line means it's a heading. Two asterisks around text means it's bold. The beauty is that the formatting is readable even in its raw form — you know what something looks like without needing a preview.

For technical writing, markdown is unbeatable. Code blocks, inline code, links, lists — they all have straightforward syntax that doesn't get corrupted when you move between tools. I can write a document in MDtoTEXT, save it as a .md file, open it in VS Code, push it to GitHub, and it looks exactly the same everywhere.

Try doing that with a .docx file. You can't even open it properly in two different versions of Word, let alone across different applications.

Markdown is also dramatically faster once you learn the syntax. I can write a heading, bold text, and add a link without ever touching the mouse. My hands stay on the keyboard. Over the course of a day, that speed adds up significantly.

The Ugly Truth About Rich Text Portability

Here's a specific example from my own experience. Last year I was migrating a company wiki from Confluence to a static site generator. The export gave me HTML with hundreds of nested tags, inline styles from three different sources, and divs inside of divs inside of more divs. I spent two weeks cleaning it up.

If the original content had been written in markdown, the migration would have taken two hours. Copy the .md files, adjust the frontmatter, done.

This is the hidden cost of rich text editors. They feel convenient in the moment but they lock your content into a specific format that's painful to get out of. Markdown gives you ownership of your content. It's just text. You can open it in any editor on any operating system.

When I Use Each One

After years of bouncing between both, here's my current workflow:

Markdown for: Documentation, README files, blog posts, notes, technical specs, anything that goes into version control, email drafts (seriously, try it), meeting notes.

Rich text for: Collaborative editing with non-technical teammates, documents that need precise visual formatting, anything where comments and suggestions in the margin are essential.

There's overlap and the lines blur sometimes. But generally, if I'm writing something that will exist as a file or be published on the web, I write it in markdown first. If it's a collaborative document that needs to go through review rounds with people who don't code, I use Google Docs and brace myself for the formatting pain.

Bottom Line

Rich text editors aren't going anywhere and they shouldn't. They serve a purpose. But for anyone who writes regularly — developers, technical writers, bloggers, students — learning markdown is one of those skills that pays off every single day. It takes maybe an hour to learn the basics and a week to get comfortable. After that, you'll wonder why you ever tolerated fighting with toolbar buttons.