“Why I prefer human-readable file formats”

Choosing human-readable file formats is an act of technological sovereignty. It’s about maintaining control over your data, ensuring long-term accessibility, and building systems that remain comprehensible and maintainable over time. The slight overhead of human readability pays dividends in flexibility, durability, and peace of mind.

These formats also represent a philosophy: that technology should serve human understanding rather than obscure it. In choosing transparency over convenience, we build more resilient, more maintainable, and ultimately more trustworthy systems.
↫ Adële

It’s hard not to agree with this sentiment. I definitely prefer being able to just open and read things like configuration files as if they’re text files, for all the same reasons Adële lists in their article. It just makes managing your system a lot easier, since I means you won’t have to rely on the applications the files belong to to make any changes.

I think this also extends to other areas. When I’m dealing with photo or music library tools, I want them to use the file system and directories in a human-readable way. Having to load up an entire photo management application just to sort some photos seems backwards to me; why can’t I use my much leaner file manager to do this instead? I also want emails to be stored as individual files in directories matching mailboxes inside my email client, just like BeOS used to do back in the day (note that this is far from exclusive to BeOS). If I load up my file manager, and create a new directory inside the root mail directory I designated and copy a few email files into it, my email client should reflect that.

As operating systems get ever more locked down, we’re losing the human-readability of our systems, and that’s not a good development.