A few months ago, my dog needed surgery. And for reasons I’ve written about elsewhere, I went to a vet several hours’ drive north of London. In fact, there were multiple trips, which kept me from my desk for days at a time.
So I bought the cheapest Chromebook I could find – something light and cheerful to write on while I waited around.
My main machine is a Mac. I have been deep inside the Apple ecosystem for years. Notes sync, drafts sync, the calendar syncs, the photos sync, and it all happens silently on iCloud, like magic1.
But Chromebooks and iCloud don’t speak to each other, really. So I had a practical problem: how to keep the same text file alive on both machines, without copying and pasting, emailing things to myself, or faffing around with Dropbox.
The answer I stumbled on was GitHub.
GitHub is generally a tool for programmers – a place where people who write code keep their code, share it, and track every change they make to it. But it’s also a remarkably clean way to keep a folder of text files synchronised across any number of devices, on any operating system.
On my Mac, I access the files through the Terminal, a plain black window where you type instructions. On the Chromebook, I do the same. On my iPhone, I open the GitHub app. All three are looking at the same folder of text files. When I finish writing on the Mac, I type two short commands and the files go up to GitHub. When I open the Chromebook next, I type one short command and they come down. Same files, same content.
I realise this may sound like a step backwards. And in a sense it is. The system pre-dates the smooth, mouse-driven, drag-and-drop web we all now live in. It doesn’t have a gleaming interface. Nobody has designed a friendly onboarding experience. It feels as if I’m using a computer from about 1998.
But it feels better, not worse. It’s faster and feels more honest. I know exactly where my files are. They are on my machine, and they are on GitHub, and that is all.
Doing this has also made me notice (yet again) how much I had been relying on iCloud. Apple is one of the so-called Magnificent Seven tech companies – a handful of firms that have come to dominate the landscape of ordinary life, collecting rent.
For years now, I have been paying Google £21 a month to hold my data – documents, spreadsheets, the lot – and quite possibly to read it too. I am now planning to pull the whole lot out and keep it as text files instead. There is something pleasing about the thought that a Chromebook, built by Google, is what prompted me to move my files out of Google’s cloud.
The system I have ended up with is mostly just text files. I write them in any editor I like. They sit in a folder on my computer. Once a day or so, I tell GitHub about any changes. The next time I pick up any other device – laptop, phone, borrowed machine – everything I’ve written is there.
I write for a living, and I have come to think that where my words sit matters almost as much as what they say. A writer’s tools aren’t neutral. The platforms we use shape what we produce, who sees it, and whether we still have it in ten years. Plain text in a folder I control is, among other things, a small act of creative self-respect.
But this won’t suit everyone. If you’d rather not go anywhere near a command line, stop reading here. But if you’ve ever worried about how much of your writing lives inside someone else’s cloud – well, it turns out the coders have been sitting on a rather elegant solution for about 15 years.
1 Like magic. I don’t actually know how iCloud works. I don’t think many people do. I just know it syncs my things, until it doesn’t, and then I’m stuck.
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