garden
evergreen·tended Jan 30, 2026

Markdown as a Database

Why plain text files beat a real database for the things I actually own.

markdowndatachordlist

Chordlist stores every song as a Markdown file. No table, no migration, no ORM. People think this is a toy decision. It isn't.

A Markdown library is:

  • portable - it survives any app, syncs over anything, opens in any editor
  • diff-able - git shows you exactly what changed in a chord chart
  • future-proof - text outlives every framework, including this one

The frontmatter carries the structure (key, capo, artist) and the body carries the content. A tiny parser turns it into UI. That's the whole stack.

This is the same instinct behind this This Digital Garden: the notes you are reading are plain text, parsed at load. The database is the filesystem.

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