Moving my notes from Notion to plain Markdown
Notion is great until you want your data somewhere Notion isn't — offline on a plane, in a terminal, inside a git repo. I kept hitting small frictions: export formats that lose structure, search that only works when logged in, pages that load slowly on bad hotel wifi.
So I moved everything to plain Markdown files in one folder, synced between machines with Syncthing. The setup:
- One folder,
notes/, with subfolders per topic. No database, no app lock-in. - Syncthing between laptop, phone and the little home server. It just works, and it's all on my own devices.
- VS Code with a Markdown preview for writing; plain
grep -rfor searching, which is honestly faster than any in-app search I've used.
What I lost: pretty databases, embedded widgets, the mobile app experience. What I gained: every note is a file I can open with anything, forever. For the kind of notes I actually keep — checklists, snippets, half-formed ideas — files win.
The migration itself took an afternoon: Notion's Markdown export, a pass with sed to fix image paths, and done. Should have done it two years ago.