30 ms·

Write plain text files

• Epiphany21 5y ago
  I like plain text for the simplicity. It's easier to find my thoughts and focus on writing when the editor is as simple as a rock, otherwise I'll spend hours fiddling with the settings. Typically I use GNU Nano for its lack of features.
• martyalain 5y ago
  My single tool is a homemade tiny wiki, lambdatank, usable from any web browser and storing pages as text files. Instead of Markdown I structure pages using a homemade language, lambdatalk, a dialect of lambda-calculus, inspired by Lisp, a single syntax built on HTML, CSS, JAVASCRIPT, DOM, ... With which I can boldify "Hello World" writing {b Hello World}, I can compute the diagonal of a square rectangle writing {sqrt {+ {* 3 3} {* 4 4}}}, create functions, draw graphics, play with the Mandelbrot set, as it can be seen here: http://lambdaway.free.fr http://lambdaway.free.fr So I totally agree with you, and my datas will be free forever. Alain Marty
• Jentifgq 5y ago
  funny, I almost agree with using text - except my goto is Excel. All my thoughts, todo lists, etc always in Excel. I guess I like compounding numbers too much =)
• mheyman 5y ago
  Markdown is "plain text" (all "ascii"). Works great. Maintaining three Web sites and a couple of gemini:// sites and all are in `git` repos.
• thiagomg 5y ago
  I’d say that it’s not necessarily plain text files, but some text based formats, preferably open. Easy to parse, read and improve. I follow something similar here, but with a difference that I don’t do anything in closed or binary formats, except for images and such binary only things, that I use only open formats. It’s being working fine - I also have everything in a source control (moved to git, currently). As someone suggested here, there’s no better way to see changes over time when you need to see a previous version.
• beckingz 5y ago
  I really like obsidian for writing text files. Technically they're markdown, but I almost never look at them as markdown files.
• peterxpark 5y ago
  I've tried a lot of different things over decades. And, after countless experimentation, I'm still at the same place... I store data all over the place. I have Evernote for long book notes and tracking financial data. I'm using notion right now as my base of notes for learning how to build a cabin (toggles and embedding videos is wonderful). I tried to really use roam and its off-shots for a while but could never really get into it. And i use a new txt file all the time. Anytime I don't know what I need or going to do. And 90% of the time, I never look at them again but they're all in my one synced folder. At the end of the day, I keep thinking I'll settle on one solution but I'm doubtful that's ever going to be true.
  • christophilus 5y ago
    > and 90% of the time, I never look at them again So, you’re a note squirrel. So am I. I’ve stopped caring or stressing out about it. I just accept that I’m never going to be overly organized or systematic. I do keep all of my notes in a /notes folder or sub folder so that fuzzy find works nicely. That’s the extent of my organization.
    • jiggunjer 5y ago
      I named my folder scribbles. It doubles as a trash bin.
  • chronicc 5y ago
    Do you know https://obsidian.md/ https://obsidian.md/? It's a note taking app with plugins. There are some for todos and excalidraw for drawing on whiteboards.
    • iszomer 5y ago
      I'm a Joplin user but I've been slowly learning Obsidian too. Level1Techs [0] did a fantastic primer on Obsidian and gave a thoughtful reflection on the zettelkastan method [1]. Josh Duffney's youtube channel [2] on Obsidian is also worth the watch too. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H69tRdemJiM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H69tRdemJiM [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettelkasten https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettelkasten [2] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCV1T7JbfzbE2O7P3kydmKw/videos https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCV1T7JbfzbE2O7P3kydmKw/vid...
• themodelplumber 5y ago
  I like it, it was fun to see the plain version at the end too. Outliving formats is an interesting angle. I'm sure some of us know people who still use proprietary formats and software from the 1990s or earlier. They keep backups, but they keep using what worked for them. Some years back I wrote a modernizing-controller for a Dreamweaver site behind a traditional craftsman's business that is doing pretty well, especially with the help of the web. The modernizations I needed to plan for were so many that they had to think long and hard about years remaining until retirement. The scope changes I received were super awkward because I could feel their frustration with new ways of doing things. It was strange to see things like the .dwt Dreamweaver formats still in use. They also used other proprietary software & formats. But I do find it hard to imagine that text files (in the sense of the article) would have run the site at any point. Text files do take a bit of a stoic philosophy to really grok at some level IMO, and this has been true since maybe the '70s? The thing about text is, first of all the information is the expression framework. This is backwards for a lot of psychologies out there. The emotional components show up as decoration. Font color schemes, etc. The article also mentions mind mapping and other tools. Those can be really important as a way to express what is inside the mind as a completely different type of process. Mind maps in particular address a problem of categorical expression, in a breadth-first context. This makes the visual itself a very useful format-as-framework. I find that I use them just enough (I have my own variant) that I keep a semi-yearly Freeplane file at hand even though I mostly use text. Anyhoo. :-) Lots of good points in there. Thanks for sharing the article.
• hprotagonist 5y ago
  i tend to make an exception for sqlite, but otherwise i’m much the same.
• blueridge 5y ago
  I've been using iA Writer for all of my text and writing needs for many years, couldn't be happier. https://ia.net/writer https://ia.net/writer
  • cambrianentropy 5y ago
    iA Writer user here too! Was wondering if it would show up.
  • vishkk 5y ago
    Same! And I love it.
• jeroenhd 5y ago
  I tend to go for (simple) markdown rather than pure text files. It can be rendered into some fancy format, but the source code is also readable to humans. With chat apps like Slack and Discord taking it up, even non-technical people tend to understand what it means to put emphasis on something. You get the benefits of plain text with the ability to empathise, without fancy formats. Such a format also enforces paragraphs and lists to be consistent, which is great for easy of reading. There are other, similar slightly-more-than-plain-text formats (RST is common among some communities, for example) with the same benefits, and everyone can pick their favourites and use them freely because in the end these formats are easy to parse as a human.
  • AJayWalker 5y ago
    This is my experience as well. I admire anyone that goes full .txt but I missed how easily markdown allows me to hierarchically organize my thoughts via headings and sub-headings.
    • Aerroon 5y ago
      The difference between markdown and full .txt is minor though. You type the same way in both.
• andrewclunn 5y ago
  Is there a modern text editor that only supports ASCII, so I can take my plain text notes and store pages and pages of them in one or two KB?
  • jibalt 5y ago
    Numerous modern editors support ASCII. There's no reason to want one to only support ASCII, and it certainly isn't required to deal with plain text notes. Where do you store them now? And 2 KB is 2 thousand characters ... "pages and pages" of notes sounds like more than that.
  • josephg 5y ago
    Maybe, but there's no reason to use an ASCII-only text editor. (Almost) all modern text editors use UTF-8. And UTF-8 stores all the characters in the 7 bit ASCII table the same way ASCII does. The result of that is, so long as you don't add any emoji or anything to your documents, a 2022 version of VS Code will store your text files in the same format as vi did in 1976.
    • vdqtp3 5y ago
      Until you copy and paste from a website that is using em dash, en dash or smart quotes...
  • tasha0663 5y ago
    Most of them should have an ANSI setting. It might be stashed as an option in the save dialog. If space is really an issue, zip them. Plain text always compresses wonderfully.
  • tyingq 5y ago
    One nice alternative is a clipboard widget for your OS that strips formatting and other stuff out. I use "PureText" on windows to remove formatting and it works great for me for many things, though it only strips rich text formatting.
  • CRConrad 5y ago
    Even if your editor "supports" other encodings than ASCII -- i e. it can save text in other formats -- many (most?) of them can be set to save in some particular encoding by default (so set it to save as ASCII), and usually they save previously-existing files in the same encoding the files already had. And, as someone already mentioned, all the first 127 characters of the UTF-8 encoding are the same as the ASCII ones, so a UTF-8-encoded file containing only those characters is identical to -- is -- an ASCII-encoded file.
• veidr 5y ago
  This is good advice, but (as he notes halfway through the post) "plain text" comes in a lot of forms. I would also add that for life-long storage of "whatever" you do probably also need attachments. (I guess we could say “plain files”. And for those, more JPEG/PDF than .doc/.cwk (Hi mom! :) ) For a couple decades I used my IMAP mail server's "Drafts" mailbox as a kind of poor man's Notion|OneNote|Evernote|Blahblahnote. It supported plain text, and attachments. It was enough, and more importantly, not too much. Today, I do use things like Notion and other locked-in products, just to know the landscape (sure has gotten better since the 1990s! wow!), but if it is anything more important than a grocery list (such as, say... scraps of my novel, baby name lists, pet name lists, boat name lists...) I make sure to use something like Logseq, Marktext, Obsidian, or yeah, just .txt.
  • cocteaus 5y ago
    Thank you for reminding me the IMAP "drafts" trick! I had been using it for 10+ years with pine/mutt but the transition to mobile killed it for me.
• meerita 5y ago
  I write a lot of markdown files. Almost all my writings are on text plain markdown files.
• wolverine876 5y ago
  I use plain text because there is no multimedia equivalent that is universal and end-user controlled, and there are no multimedia equivalents to Vim, Grep, regex, etc. Text is great, but an image, table, or diagram are sometimes irreplaceable. We think we are great innovators, but we are stuck in 1990. Notice also that there are no Vim-equivalents for phones, even though that platform has been widely used for 15+ years. Sorry Bill Joy; sorry Bell Labs; sorry (many more); we let you down, and we let down the public, which now has no integrated multimedia format beyond WordPress or Instagram.
  • kromato4 5y ago
    iVim is a very nice port of vim to iOS that is regularly updated: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ivim/id1266544660 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ivim/id1266544660
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • themadturk 5y ago
    There are plenty of text editors for phones; many of them cost very little. I don't find iVim very useful on a touch screen, but that's probably just me.
  • syntheweave 5y ago
    I think we're right on the precipice of this changing. PDF has long been the preferred format for dead-tree-like documents. It isn't quite as open, cleanly designed or navigable as we'd like but it has the inertial force to continue staying in use for decades. Lately I've been working with Inkscape and realized that SVG also has the capacity to be a freeform document tool, and one with a different default context than HTML(scrolling document) or PDF(paginated document). The default setup involves a canvas, it has a notion of object hierarchies that lets you browse content from an outline, it lets you embed assets and layout in a more-or-less arbitrary fashion, it can be coded with JS, and there's some (under-explored) possibility for structured accessibility. It just needs a viewer that approaches the format in a way that makes sense as a target for content creation, beyond its existing role of small vector icons and simple animations. None of the existing formats have to work exactly right, they just have to be the starting point for a streamlined source; then make a direct viewer for the source and you have the integrated multimedia format.
• encryptluks2 5y ago
  Wait until this person hears about Markdown.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• gatonegro 5y ago
  > Every few years a new company says you should use their special format. You have to pay them a monthly fee to use it — or keep all of your documents in their care. [...] When you store your writing in one company’s unique format, then you need that program to access it. Then the economy takes a turn, they go out of business, and your work is trapped in an unusable format. This is something I've been dealing with lately. I have over a decade's worth of important personal and work files in proprietary formats, since I used Windows and Adobe's stuff for a long time. These days I'm using Linux exclusively, so my only option to read many of those formats is to hope that things like GIMP and Inkscape are able to open them somewhat accurately. All the documents I created in InDesign are as good as gone. I still have the files, but they're locked behind proprietary software that I couldn't use even if I wanted to. Oh, well... For creating documents I've been learning LaTeX, and for note-taking I quite like Vimwiki[1]. I don't do nearly as much graphics work as I used to, though I appreciate things like the fact that Inkscape uses plain SVG by default. I'd rather not be locked out of my own files again in the future. [1] https://vimwiki.github.io/ https://vimwiki.github.io/
  • iLoveOncall 5y ago
    > they're locked behind proprietary software that I couldn't use even if I wanted to Hum, yes you could. The formats aren't dead. It's like putting on a blindfold and saying you couldn't see even if you wanted. Just remove the blindfold. Just install Windows or Mac.
• mr_tristan 5y ago
  I think of it as "content and presentation should be as independent as possible". This is the content side: don't bother with fancy unreadable formats. I've been thinking about this as I try to think about my own personal website. I'd like to have my content versioned, but, was really not loving the idea of tying myself to even a static website generator. This is where I still ponder an approach more like antora (https://antora.org https://antora.org), where you can have a "doc repo" vs a "site repository". Thus, the concept of a version is really obvious. I've also recently reorganized my professional notes into... a git repo that is only structured markdown files, one file per day, organized by year/month. And... it just works great.
• inasio 5y ago
  My personal mantra is to use software/formats/etc that have been around at least as long as what you intend your content to last. Been there, been burned before...
• elteto 5y ago
  This is one of the main strengths of Obsidian, which I have been using lately and I’m extremely happy with: everything is just Markdown files in some folder on disk. Zero danger of lock in. You can have a disk hierarchy if you desire, or trust that search will find you what you are looking for. For me search works fairly well and if I need something extra I can just grep/sed/awk. Plus it has the features that a simple text editor will not have: displaying images, live preview, relationships between topics, etc. It even has a Vim mode!
  • tdhz77 5y ago
    Been using obsidian for two weeks and the tagging / linking to documents is top notch, saving it to my internet drive at work brings out the best of all worlds
  • nextos 5y ago
    I use org-mode the same way. I have a flat directory with many small files, inspired by Zettelkasten and by simple wikis. No server, no dependencies. This also works well for small organizations. Both GitHub and GitLab are able to render org files, with some minor limitations. Hence, a simple repository full of org files is already a wiki. Even local links just work, with zero dependencies. It's possible to transform org files into HTML with some CI task to get support for all org features. But I have found this a bit of an overkill. I don't need most org features. The basics are already great: outlines, timestamps, hyperlinks, tables and footnotes. You can achieve more or less the same things with Markdown as well.
    • rileyphone 5y ago
      There’s also org-roam, which introduces the bi-directional links that systems like Obsidian have. Just make sure you’re on v2. This is truly the era of the memex.
    • DerArzt 5y ago
      The only problem with org (which may not be a problem for some folks) is that if you want to be able to edit org files with the least friction you need to use Emacs. I tried the org extension for VS Code and vim in the past and they just weren't quite the same as editing org via emacs.
• Melatonic 5y ago
  Words have meaning Prose are Powerful
• christiangenco 5y ago
  I had a quick back-and-forth with Derek on HN a few weeks ago about applying this philosophy to a personal CRM system: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30329475#30334269 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30329475#30334269
• analog31 5y ago
  My amusing anecdote is that I've pretty much settled on Markdown, but I'm still struggling to completely wean myself of the habit of constantly looking at the rendered output alongside the text source. My entire work group is OK with Markdown now, and even the managers don't care any more. I wonder if the lockdown has resulted in communication being less formal overall.
• sedatk 5y ago
  Promotes plain text files Writes HTML tags :shrug:
• strken 5y ago
  The nice thing about .docx is that it's a zip file full of xml. I'd be willing to bet that zip and xml are both readable in a hundred years, even if the specific version of .docx can't be loaded into a word processor. I personally use emacs with writeroom-mode and markdown-mode plus some tweaks, but it's not realistic to expect everyone to go learn lisp and build their own text editor.
  • jamesgeck0 5y ago
    Yeah, proprietary formats are fine if they're easy to pry open and manipulate. Applications that store data in sqlite databases are also nice. The main issue is just getting locked into a single application because nothing else can read its bespoke binary file format.
    • Anunayj 5y ago
      think photoshop's psd :) https://github.com/gco/xee/blob/4fa3a6d609dd72b8493e52a68f316f7a02903276/XeePhotoshopLoader.m#L108 https://github.com/gco/xee/blob/4fa3a6d609dd72b8493e52a68f31...
• e-dt 5y ago
  I think that this can be expanded beyond just "only use plain text for important documents". I think the heart of it is really, "use only proven, open (preferably standardised) formats for important files." E.g. Markdown is a proven format (plain-text-readable but not strictly plain text), so it is likely to stay readable for a long time, and it is an open format, so you can use it right now without paying for proprietary software - so it would be suitable to use for an important file. HTML also fits the bill, so it would be suitable to store documents. (It seems that the "plain text" of this article actually uses HTML heavily.) Or, if you are making vector graphics, save them as SVG files instead of Adobe Illustrator files. And so on.
  • saintaardvark 5y ago
    You've got it exactly right. Years ago, I wrote "Any sufficiently important information must be indistinguishable from plain text", and your point is what I was trying to get at: if it's that important, make sure the format you use has tools that are as helpful, flexible, and degradation-resistant as those available for plain text.
• jasode 5y ago
  >If you rely on Word, Evernote or Notion, for example, then you can’t work unless you have Word, Evernote, or Notion. You are helpless without them. You are dependent. Although I deliberately avoid Evernote and Notion for those stated reasons, I'm fine with Microsoft Word. I've been using it for 20 years. It even opens my proprietary DOS WordPerfect ("*.wp") files from 1980s! Sometimes I need more flexible layout of fonts and graphics and MS Word is the tool I use for that. Markdown isn't an alternative. (EDIT add: Markdown isn't powerful enough for the style of documents I write. E.g. MS Word has tools to overlay graphic elements like arrows and callouts floating as editable layers on top of screenshots. Markdown can't do that.) I'm confident I can still use it as a tool decades into the future. Even if Microsoft became more user hostile and eliminated local install in future versions and required a cloud-only Office 365 account, I'll just keep using Word 2019. LibreOffice may also be a Plan B option to open docx files. Not nervous about MS Word files at all.
  • chrisweekly 5y ago
    "Markdown isn't an alternative." Strongest possible respectful disagreement. --- ^ orig comment above, edits below (I was interrupted when 1st commenting; apologies to anyone who responded to the short version) --- See eg Obsidian (https://obsidian.md https://obsidian.md) for a great example. It's astonishing how feature-rich it's become. WYSIWYG editor, Excalidraw integration, Slid.es, etc etc etc. And if you have any webdev chops at all, you have access to HTML, CSS and JavaScript. It's not even close.
    • _ofdw 5y ago
      Markdown is actually awful. There's at least 3 different dialects that are all called Markdown, so if you want your text rendered it's a toss-up as to whether or not it'll look how you intend. I think that Markdown's success is due to a lack of a widely-used, simple alternative that's well-specified. Org is easily and objectively the best markup but of course it's only very very recently that there was a non-emacs implement worth a damn.
      • Seirdy 5y ago
• imgabe 5y ago
  Another advantage to plain text files: source control. You can check your writing into git and get a history of all your edits. It’s something programmers take for granted, but it would be amazing if this got more widely adopted outside of tech. The number of files with names like “Report Final Final draft v3.docx” is truly staggering. “Git for everything“ would be a multi-billion dollar startup easily.
  • niutech 5y ago
    As for "git for everything", try SparkleShare or LogicalDOC CE.
  • bob1029 5y ago
    > “Git for everything“ would be a multi-billion dollar startup easily. In addition to plaintext documents, I have found that a simple JSON diff is also a very effective way to demonstrate changes between 2 complex biz objects. Non-developers can cope with this as long as the differences are visually obvious (red=removed, green=new, etc) and the object graph is reasonably flat. Everything can be trivially serialized to a JSON document, so this scales super well in my experience. We use a port of Google's DiffMatchPatch to generate human-friendly HTML reports of object diffs in our latest administration tools.
    • jollybean 5y ago
      Git is barely useable by technical people. Git would be a byzantine disaster for 'everyone else'. The graph and abstractions involved introduce enormous unnecessary complexity. Now, 'historical changes for everyone' - yes. But not Git. Git is very powerful, but ultimately a questionably valuable product in many cases overall. And we've now settled on it, so it's a bit difficult to displace.
  • yarky 5y ago
    I was actually surprised : last time I used Git Bash on Windows it did work quite well with .docx files. Then I switched jobs to avoid touching .docx files ... The best alternative I've found to generate .docx output is R markdown, which uses pandoc under the hood and let's you program the whole document the way LaTeX would.
• posharma 5y ago
  I'm a fan of text files. But many times you just want to capture the image and store it. For e.g. a bills/receipts. Secondly, the article doesn't talk about syncing - may be onedrive/dropbox? what are some good solutions here? Third, how do you do this (writing/editing notes) on a mobile phone?
  • coffeeling 5y ago
    Check out Obsidian.md Proper notetaking app, can show images inline (but stores the note and image as a plaintext file and a normal image file, the text file just has a line for what image to show like: /Notebook/Attachments/Bill.png /Notebook/Notes/Bill.md Bill.md contents: Went to restaurant and got this for the trouble: ![[Bill.png]] They have a full features mobile app and sell an end to end encrypted sync service for the app. It's as good as it gets, IMO.
• justsomehnguy 5y ago
  > I’ve brought my text files with me since 1990, from Mac to Windows to Linux to BSD > But plain text? Always. Everywhere. Quite obviously you have your files in ASCII. Anyone who needs more than 26 letters (or god forbid non-latin ones) are fucked. Sometimes quite literally. > Your writing should outlive you. Depending on companies is not an option. ASCII? Sure. EBCDIC? Ughh. UTF... 8? 16? 32? > If you rely on Word, Evernote or Notion, for example, then you can’t work unless you have Word, Evernote, or Notion. You are helpless without them And you are absolutely helpless if you can't access your ASCII/EBCDIC/UTF8whatever plain-text files. > Plain text can be converted into anything else. Date: 2022.02.03 Is this March 3rd or February 3rd? > NEED HIERARCHY Sure. But in the year 2022 I want not only a hierarchy but crosslinks too. > CONCLUSION > Reliable If you know the encoding. IF. > flexible See #date > portable See #date > independent Sure, but what about dates and encoding? > and long-lasting If on the suitable media. Good luck accessing your precious files on Google Drive when the mighty AI decided you aren't worthy to access them. Or your CD-ROM isn't readable because the last machine with working [0] CD-ROM compatible drive were thrown out 5 years ago because it can't run any modern OS[1] > Plain text files will be readable by future generations, hundreds of years from now. [x] Doubt Real conclusion: Sure, plain-text files are way better than binary blobs with unknown structure, but they are not a silver bullet. You still need to think about how, where and in what format to store them. 5/10, would not recommend. [0] The last machine in my house with CD-ROM drive is X301 which is .. somewhere. My desktop's NEC-45xx was dead last time (6 years ago) I tried. [1] CentOS8 performance with Gnome on ThinkPad X301 is abysmal to say the least. Even Windows 10 (!) runs better on it. PS: to the kind person who bothered to downvote this comment: do you prefer your UTF encoded files with BOM or not? And your preferred editing software?
  • CRConrad 5y ago
    > Anyone who needs more than 26 letters (or god forbid non-latin ones) are fucked. Anyone ... are fucked. Hmm... > If on the suitable media. Hmm. (Oh, and still February 3rd, obv. March 3rd would be 2022.03.03.)
  • overeater 5y ago
    I didn't downvote you but your tone is overly dramatic for some simple heuristics. Specifically you're just repeating two things over and over. Here's some simple answers: 1) you're right that ASCII was English only, but now utf-8 is the defacto standard, backwards compatible with ASCII, and good for every language. Use that, no BOM needed and the BOM is discouraged by the standard anyway. 2) dates can be YYYY-MM-DD as per the ISO standard. Also they're sortable as a string too as a nice side effect. All good?
• irrational 5y ago
  This is exactly why I love Markdown and why I heartily disagree with this guy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30395130 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30395130
• westcort 5y ago
  Some key points: --There will always be plenty of free, non-commercial software in the public domain for reading and editing text files --Whether future virtual reality, or a chip you can implant in your earlobe, plain text will be there --Maybe it’s just another distraction, focusing on the tools instead of your thinking --They offer some convenience or features, but at the cost of flexibility, portability, and independence This is why I still love my AlphaSmart Dana running CardTXT. I have done a lot of writing with that machine, and it has never let me down. Even if it did, I could just swap out the SD card.
• thenerdhead 5y ago
  I always fall prey to popular knowledge management apps or fads. And I still somehow come right on back to .txt files.
• sgallant 5y ago
  I'm a big believer in this, but I use https://bear.app/ https://bear.app/. It supports the Markdown format and can export to .md files, but it uses SQLite under the hood, I believe. What's amazing about this is that your thought archive is now searchable (which is fast in bear).
  • jbc1 5y ago
    Do you find text files to otherwise be difficult to search?
  • crossroadsguy 5y ago
    https://fsnot.es https://fsnot.es - FSNotes is a native (~100% Swift) FOSS app which I believe is modelled after Bear.app. I have been looking at it for sometime now, from a distance. Very active development. Lots of options. But it still doesn’t seem as stable as I would like it to be. Though sometimes it seems kinda all over. For example - it lets you set a storage and then another storage for “git” handling id you’d like to use it. Adding external folder doesn’t import the notes, it just shows a folder there. Sometimes restarting the app does the trick, or just removing or adding again. So there’s sync option (iCloud only), there’s storage location, there’s external folder addition, then there’s git as well. I am sharing it here because many of you might like these many features. I still believe it has huge potential and I’ll give it a more full fledged try once it has a more reliable and transparent sync option unlike what iCloud sync is (my biggest gripe with iCloud sync is it doesn’t let me choose where I want to see/keep the raw files and there’s no versioning and if there is I’m not. It fails not in silence but radio silence).
    • awill 5y ago
      I'd never heard of fsnot.es. It looks great. I bought Ulysses ages ago on Mac because I wanted a performant, native-app markdown app that supported external folders. Unfortunately, shortly after purchasing it Ulysses went subscription only. I had no alternative, so I kept paying. However, I don't used any of the advanced features, and I'm really overpaying when I have no iPhone, don't use iCloud, and just do simple markdown. I'll check out fsnotes to see if it can replace Ulysses for me. I have considered switching from Android to iPhone, but I don't know how I'd do notes on it. For work I can't use iCloud. I can only use my company's backup solution. Then for my personal notes I have Android and Linux (desktop), so I can't use iCloud, so I use syncthing or Google Drive. If I went to iOS, I don't know how I'd get my personal notes on Linux syncing with iOS. All the native iOS apps only support iCloud.
• every 5y ago
  I'm a bit of a fan: https://every.sdf.org/ https://every.sdf.org/
• justsomeuser 5y ago
  What about PDF/A? Considering that every browser, OS and printer has a reader implementation, and there is a spec defined, surely this makes it on par with plain text? You could use any document editor (Word, Pages, Apple Notes etc), and as long as it can export to PDF you are no longer tied to the note taking companies proprietary software for reading and writing. Future indexing systems will surely support PDF.
  • chipotle_coyote 5y ago
    PDF is explicitly designed as a final output format (and PDF/A is explicitly designed for archival purposes). They're good for that purpose, but it's literally like storing the digital version of a printed copy of a document rather than the source. That's fine if your only goal is preservation for reading, but preservation in a format that can be edited, converted, transformed, etc., lets out PDF as a target.
    • justsomeuser 5y ago
      Yeh I agree, it’s write once read everywhere. But if you need rich text and images, it seems like the only alternative to plain text.
• glacials 5y ago
  Real question: what is the use case for viewing notes from 30 years ago? Things that come to mind are evidence in a court of law and having fun looking back on old memories, neither of which seems worth the sometimes incredible amount of trouble.
  • runjake 5y ago
    Old journals, memories, historical data. It’s not any trouble at all to maintain and requires very little space. I’m not sure why it would seem like an “incredible amount” of trouble to you.
  • themadturk 5y ago
    Novels and short stories.
• Jenkins2000 5y ago
  +1 for AsciiDoc https://asciidoctor.org/ https://asciidoctor.org/
• aryamaan 5y ago
  there are benefits of writing in the text files and still people keep going to these shiny editors/systems. Why? Keeping the excitement of using these things aside, they do make things easier. After using backlinks now, I don't think I can go back. I like how easily I can publish Notion docs. I like how I can use mems[1]-- they have reduced the conginitive load of writing in a sublime doc. So, maybe we should try to find a solution which gives all the benefits of these "innovation" happening in this domain-- I say innovation with a quote cause I know how gimmicky they could look as most of them are but some of the features are actually part of the evolution. logseq, obsidian are the steps in that direction. I wish all these companies start addressing these issues. And in general we start having the culture of "bring your own storage" i.e get all your data in usable way. Not some text/json files which need specific programs to get anything useful out of that. A graceful exportation should be the primary feature. [1] mem.ai
  • themadturk 5y ago
    People keep coming back to shiny editors/systems because their employers demand it. Offices tend to like Word, as do book publishers. Yes, Pandoc, Scrivener, etc. will output your writing in Word format, but not all writers and office workers are tech people. They go with the simplest compatible/allowable option. At my company, we create complex Word documents that are frequently edited. Using a different format (ie, a marked up text file run through Pandoc or LaTex) is far more trouble than its worth. My personal stuff is in Markdown.
• ryanqian 5y ago
  Only the formats which used by majority will long live.
• sys_64738 5y ago
  My boss used to write emails in Word and email those as attachments.
• nivethan 5y ago
  I think plain files are great but really I take notes from far too many places and I want to take notes alongside my browsing. Most of what I write is always in response to something but its a response I don't want public. It's a weird zone to be in. If anyone is looking for a note taking app that's pretty brain dead simple, I made one. This is really more about note taking on websites rather than general note taking. I also like to think by focusing on just the notes and making it feature complete at this point means that it will last for a long time. https://leftwrite.io https://leftwrite.io https://leftwrite.io/how-to https://leftwrite.io/how-to One thing I tried to do was make sure everything is exportable and that backups are on you to maintain. This way the data is always in your hands even when its in mine. Maybe because I'm in the echo chamber but it feels like everyone's looking for some sort of knowledge base system to use. Is this something only devs care about or is everyone on the planet trying to keep their thoughts on hand.
• fallat 5y ago
  I do exactly this. http://len.falken.directory http://len.falken.directory Extremely relevant: http://len.falken.directory/misc/writing-for-the-internet-across-a-human-lifetime.txt http://len.falken.directory/misc/writing-for-the-internet-ac...
• xixixao 5y ago
  Perhaps I’m too young, but I don’t find most of my writing relevant years later. Amusing maybe. So I don’t worry too much about the current platform I’m using being obsolete. I do want the ability to back up to plaintext with a single click though. And I do stick close to plaintext for its focus. Bear is the best compromise so far.
  • CA0DA 5y ago
    As you age, your memory deteriorates and you have more experiences to store in it. I have been keeping daily notes on my work for about 8 years. It's really really really nice for cases where someone asks me something about a customer or technology or solution to a problem and I'm able to pull it up with a quick search.
  • wodenokoto 5y ago
    > but I don’t find most of my writing relevant years later. But that one little nugget that is relevant, can be worth a lot years later.
• CA0DA 5y ago
  Joplin has a wysiwyg editor that stores the actual data as markdown, I like that feature.
  • cryptos 5y ago
    You can even use an external editor to edit notes.
• hjalmarlucius 5y ago
  I've been in finance, consulting and private equity for 15 years before starting my own software shop. Moving from proprietary, WYSIWYG formats (mainly MS Office) to markdown / code as a way of working has been a game changer. Traceability, scalability and productivity is an order of magnitude better.
• revicon 5y ago
  I keep all my txt file notes in GitHub repos, works great for me. One thing I’m still trying to solve, taking new notes while I’m mobile. I haven’t found a good easy way to create/edit notes and commit them to git while I’m on my iPhone. The GitHub mobile app does not allow editing. The GitHub website does but it’s clumsy to use on a mobile device. Anyone have suggestions for a solution?
  • JonathanBuchh 5y ago
    I have been using Working Copy[0] for this. It is super full-featured and the developer is super cool for making everything free for students through the GitHub Student Developer Pack. [0]: https://workingcopyapp.com/ https://workingcopyapp.com/
• ysh7 5y ago
  Here's another very similar project which follows the same concept and construct: https://jrnl.sh https://jrnl.sh PS. I am not the author or contributor just a daily user of it and i like it.
  • sxldier 5y ago
    This looks interesting. Thanks for posting!
• Aerroon 5y ago
  Whenever I need to write something longer than a small forum list I write it in Notepad++. I then copy the text into whatever editor I'm using to stylize it. It just seems way cleaner to write things in the editor that ignores style.
• gotorazor 5y ago
  I sometimes have to write things down in French. ascii is kind of clumsy for things like non breaking spaces. Anyone has a suggestion for this?
  • paxys 5y ago
    Plain text doesn't have to mean ASCII. Every major OS/text editor supports UTF-8.
  • wodenokoto 5y ago
    UTF-8, which I think a lot of developers considers "plain text" now a days. Out of pure curiosity: Why do you need non-breaking spaces? I don't think I've ever used one, and now I'm wondering if I am missing out :)
    • AlanYx 5y ago
      In French, there are various conventions around quotation marks ("guillemets") that may involve inserting non-breaking spaces (ideally, a NARROW NO-BREAK SPACE), depending on your workflow.
• galaxyLogic 5y ago
  I like to write text-files whose content is wrapped into <pre> -tag. After the pre-section I add: <style> pre { font-family: Verdana; } </style> Pre looks great in Verdana, in the default font not so great. You might choose to add the style-definition inline into the pre-tag directly. But I like a very simple start for my text-files which is just the <pre> opening tag. You can wrap parts of the content into other tags like <h2> for headers.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• FpUser 5y ago
  I do this forever. I have most o my important docs as a simple text files.
• _carbyau_ 5y ago
  I see plain text with images/audio/video presented in their own formats, is html. Just, without the CSS and Javascript. Adding in some script... maybe people would like https://tiddlywiki.com/ https://tiddlywiki.com/ Open Source, usable on iOS and Android via apps. Is pretty much a self contained webpage but it allows drag'n'drop image files onto the edit box.
• pipeline_peak 5y ago
  I just use Google Docs, I can access it on any consumer computer and I’m pretty sure there’s an offline mode.
  • fartcannon 5y ago
    Until you get deplatformed.
    • pipeline_peak 5y ago
      How so?
  • copperx 5y ago
    I agree. Google Docs is mediocre at WYSIWYG and interoperability, but boy does it solve long term storage. I don't have to worry about paying for Dropbox or having local files that I can't search quickly unless I am on a Mac with Spotlight or have full indexing on Windows or the Linux equivalent. I don't have to worry about the folder structure and the files can't vanish with an SSD failure. And, unlike text files, it's easy to insert images and tables in a Doc file.
    • pipeline_peak 5y ago
      Right, I like my raw data in the places it’s needed because the world isn’t perfect and sometimes we have less resources. I can’t shake the ridiculous feeling that comes with typing plaintext journal entries on a gaming pc.
• MarkSweep 5y ago
  Another advantage layers on the source control: many source code management services will render your markdown and give you a search interface. GitHub popularized it. But other hosts like Azure Devops and GitLab support this as well. You can make a relatively pleasant document management system on top of this. You can even run this on your own computer without an internet connection. Working Copy on iOS supports. Gollum, originally created by Tom Preston-Werner, strives to be compatiable with GitHub's wiki feature [2]. For my part, I've been learning Rust by writing a clone of Gollum called Smeagol [3]. Though really the point of the original article is: all these tool don't matter. Your plain text files can live longer than any of particular tool and continue to be useful. [1] https://workingcopyapp.com/ https://workingcopyapp.com/ [2] https://github.com/gollum/gollum https://github.com/gollum/gollum [3] https://smeagol.dev/ https://smeagol.dev/
• emptyparadise 5y ago
  I disagree with the whole "NEED VISUALS OR GRAPHICS?" section. I do need visuals! I do need graphics! I'm not a typewriter, why must my flow be interrupted with me having to leave my document to open some JPEG file whenever I need to show something that isn't text? It's not like this is crazy difficult or requires proprietary apps either. Writing a modern browser may be an impossible feat but I'm certain that it would take just a day or two to get a very simple barebones HTML renderer which supports <img> and a couple of formatting options. At this point I wish we had a tty which supports variable width and size text and inline images and video. Then I could be happy.
  • jodrellblank 5y ago
    It's 2022 and people like the blog author are all "who needs screenshots? who needs audio? who needs colours? who needs fonts or styles? who wants to see their handwriting strokes? who needs metadata? I use text because it's 1970!". Hello? 4K video in my pocket, structured data streaming out of every system around me, all I'm supposed to want to capture is plain text? What a paucity of information, of detail, what an absense of dreaming, what a position taken purely from fear - never have nice things because you might lose them one day!
    • cobbaut 5y ago
      So when you need to remember a user/password combo for a new device, offline doorbell maybe, or a parcel number, or the address of a friend, then you record a 4K video instead of writing it in a text file? Plain text just works, everywhere, all the time.
      • qayxc 5y ago
        > Plain text just works, everywhere, all the time. No it doesn't. Try a plain text description of an electronic circuit vs a circuit diagram. Try a a plain text instruction sheet vs an illustrated one. Try plain text sheet music vs actual sheet music. Try a mathematical plot vs plain text tables. Try concept drawings of product vs text descriptions. Try construction drawing vs plain text descriptions. I could go on and on. Narrow views on the world result in flawed thinking and absolutes that are just plain wrong.
• eternityforest 5y ago
  GitHub flavored markdown will be around indefinitely as will SQLite and HTML. ODT probably will be too. It sucks that storing files isn't really solved yet. Plain text needs some external means of sync. SyncThing is finally getting good again with new Android 11 features, but for a while it was limited to internal storage. And there is, unfortunately, no SyncThing cloud providers(First person to extend SyncThing with messaging, make it embeddable in other apps, and make a cloud service will have basically a universal backend for FOSS apps and solve a lot of issues). There also hasn't been good tools to actually work with the text files till recently, because android always seems to be 10 years behind desktop. You were pretty much stuck just using text editors, sans indexed search. Plain text is wonderful, but the ecosystem to actually take notes with it is just now catching up.
• sleightofmind 5y ago
  Yep. Plain text. Offline first. I pretty much consider markdown a form of plain text, whether or not that point of view is orthodox. The only two other doc tools I regularly use are a) completely human-readable plain-text hierarchical notebook with almost no markup in its stored format, b) an html notebook, whose file format is largely human-readable w/markup referencing images -- png and jpg. a) is gjots2. File format close enough to plain text to be indistinguishable. I sometimes write entries in gjots2 in markdown. I mean, why not? b) is Zim. Nuff said. I've played with recutils, and it's nicely done. But I don't want to think that hard, or be that organized. If I know I want to organize my text and massage it a bit more, I sometimes use an old text database program by Carlo Strozzi called nosql (no, not the nosql the web crowd thinks I'm referring to -- it predates that. It's relational, plain text, but not SQL, and it just uses standard nix utilities). If I need version control for plain text, the now ancient RCS program is something I seem to be able to re-familiarize myself with much quicker than I can with git. Now having said all that, if someone asks me to write/format a Christmas letter for them, well, out comes Libre Office Writer and it gets saved in docx. Why fight the universe?
• biglost 5y ago
  Use directories — also known as folders.
• mythz 5y ago
  For several years I was an avid notepad.exe + plain text files practitioner for capturing any note but have switched to using https://notable.app https://notable.app for capturing any adhoc notes. It has the same in spirit & benefits of maintaining plain-text .md files in a static directory but has all the niceties of rich markdown, embeds, attachments, search and metadata captured in .md frontmatter to organize and tag notes with categories + pinned notes in a minimal, focused UI. I've tried many note taking apps but it's been the only that's stuck & replaced notepade.exe for me.
  • autoexec 5y ago
    notable seems a lot like zim. I see Notable has (or will have) a paid subscription plan, on-line features like sharing, cloud synchronization, and encryption, but I didn't see a privacy policy anywhere.
    • mythz 5y ago
      Privacy policy for what? it just writes static .md text files to your local folder. The feature for built-in synchronization was proposed by its Author in 2019 [1], don't see any recent activity on when it will be available, it just says it will be opt-in via a paid subscription. [1] https://github.com/notable/notable/issues/819 https://github.com/notable/notable/issues/819
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• NWoodsman 5y ago
  Funny, I'm about to release my note-taking app which is plain text (xml) under the hood, handles heirarchy easily, and plays well with both version control (backups) and dropbox. Its windows tho... wanna try it?
• lngnmn2 5y ago
  Write org files. Now even vim had a mode for them. Check out what pandoc is. Don't use agenda features though, it is a huge distraction.
• RBouschery 5y ago
  Not quite plain text files, but... I've used them all - Notion, Roam, [insert any hyped app of the past 10 years here] - but then in the end, when a random thought pops up that I want to write down I always land back in Apple Notes..
  • nofunsir 5y ago
    Ah... good ol' ClarisWorks.
• slmjkdbtl 5y ago
  I've been using simplenote and kinda wanted to transition to plain text, the only thing stopping me is the mobile <-> desktop sync workflow which simplenote handles really nicely. Does anyone have any good ideas?
  • coffeeling 5y ago
    Obsidian.md stores your notes in normal folders and plaintext files on disc, all attachments as standalone normal files. The company offers a mobile app and an end to end encrypted sync service (paid). The basic app is simple, but has a good extensions API which means people can and have gone nuts with it.
  • revorad 5y ago
    Glad to see another simplenote user in the wild! I’ve been using it for years, absolutely love it. For me it’s not just the automatic syncing, but having a good app on all platforms that I really like using. On my Mac, I also run a script that commits the simplenote db to git every hour or so and pushes it to Github. It's basically like a JSON file. So I don’t worry about simplenote getting shut down.
  • xenodium 5y ago
    For org and iPhone users, I authored https://plainorg.com https://plainorg.com https://plainorg.com/#syncing-your-data https://plainorg.com/#syncing-your-data
• account-5 5y ago
  Zim-Wiki is my go-to as it pretty much manages everything for you. It mentions an advantage of not fiddling with formatting but I constantly switch between wiki markup, markdown, and even ini format; I can't help it.
  • urlwolf 5y ago
    I was a big fan of zim, but I have to admit it's falling behind the times (search is poor, graph view not useful, no collaboration, no mobile, tags are second class etc) so I reluctantly moved away from zim to amplenote.
    • account-5 5y ago
      That's the thing though, I'm only interested in offline first free software. I see no point in paying someone for my notes and I'm not collaborating with anyone on them. With zim everything it just text and folders, easily done manually if I wanted it on mobile, but for that I just use markor.
• nextlevelwizard 5y ago
  But author is not writing plain text files. As he shows at the end he is clearly writing some mixture of HTML and some custom language that he uses to parse title, tags, and date. I do agree that unless absolutely needed you shouldn't tie yourself to proprietary formats, but unless you are writing simple notes you probably want more functionality out of your files than actual plain text file can provide at which point you should instead use markdown.
  • sdoering 5y ago
    Code I write, be it python, php, HTML or JS is still plain text as a format. I can open any of these code documents in any dumb text editor. The fact that some other tool can do more with these files, parse them, execute them, "extract" some logic from them isn't relevant to the fact that I can open, read and edit these files as a pure and plain text file. Therefore adding parsable parts/logic to files like YAML headers (or any self created style) doesn't make these files 'non plaintext'. Following your logic would mean that doing any markup in a text file would make it somehow 'non plaintext'. I remember old Readme files with headlines being underlined by adding a new line full of - - - - (dashes). And stuff like this. Because these could theoretically be used to parse the files and extract headlines from the text.
    • nextlevelwizard 5y ago
      Then the whole article loses all of its meaning. If you find yourself writing Python in Word something has gone so horribly wrong there is no saving you. Just use the good old file program and you'll see that in any coherent world we classify python, php, html, and js files as different from actual plain text files. This very much feels like you are trying to argue tea is same as plain water.
      • 0xad 5y ago
        No. Open up a word document (.docx) in hex editor (head -80 foo.docx | xxd) and you'll see it's not a plain file on a binary level. Now do the same with any python, php, html, and js files and you'll see that they're plain files. That's the difference that Derek is talking about.
• hkdobrev 5y ago
  I was sick of all these services and apps with proprietary formats as well and starting writing markdown files organised in folders. I've started a simple Bash utility for organising, searching notes and extracting TODOs out of them: https://github.com/hkdobrev/notetaker https://github.com/hkdobrev/notetaker I'd be glad if someone finds it useful.
• hutrdvnj 5y ago
  I think the easiest thing to write in is markdown. It allows you to define chapters, sections, subsections, lists, italic, bold, ... so all the basic things most of us would like to have anyways. It's very easy to read without a markdown renderer as plaintext for yourself and for others. You can automatically convert it to HTML, create a presentation, create a book, all quiet easy.
• shmerl 5y ago
  Easily searchable too.
• lottin 5y ago
  I also use sc (spreadsheet calculator), a terminal-based spreadsheet program which uses a plain text file format. Very convenient for dealing with tabular or numerical data, which would be cumbersome to work with on a textual file.
  • nxpnsv 5y ago
    Last stable release for sc was 19 years ago (according to wikipedia). I guess it is perfect already :D
    • lottin 5y ago
      Yes, it's finished.
• bob66 5y ago
• cryptos 5y ago
  I've lost some old documents due to missing support of old file formats. I guess it would be possible to find some converters, but then again I'm too lazy to perform research on this topic, it is just like I'd like to look in one of those old documents from time to time (more personal history than actually important). So I tend to agreee with the approach of keeping things simple. However using a note taking app that operates on plaintext (markdown) files like Joplin could be a good middle ground.
• appsoftware 5y ago
  Agreed ownership of your notes is imperative. You do need some structure though. Try Logseq. I adopted Obsidian after Roam, but missed the low friction structure that Roam offered. But Roam was not secure and was proprietary. Logseq is the best of both worlds, is plain text based with minimal structure (markdown-ish) and is Git friendly. It's a work in progress, and needs a few files adding to .gitignore to minimise merge conflicts (pages-metadata.edn for one).
• zokier 5y ago
  > HTML, Markdown, JSON, LaTeX, and many other standard formats, are just plain text. Is parsing json (correctly) really markedly simpler/easier than parsing something like cbor?
• xenodium 5y ago
  Plain text adoption often implies markdown for a richer experience, but we also have the wonderful https://orgmode.org https://orgmode.org markup. There is no shortage of markdown-based tools on all platforms. Our org markup options, on the other hand, are very few outside of Emacs. Org markup itself is super versatile and can power lots of use-cases. I built two org-powered apps for iOS myself: https://plainorg.com https://plainorg.com https://flathabits.com https://flathabits.com There are other great ones out there: https://beorg.app https://beorg.app https://logseq.com https://logseq.com https://organice.200ok.ch https://organice.200ok.ch https://orgro.org https://orgro.org http://orgzly.com http://orgzly.com Lastly, a shoutout to Karl Voit who's been driving org markup awareness outside of Emacs with Orgdown https://gitlab.com/publicvoit/orgdown https://gitlab.com/publicvoit/orgdown. He's also discussed org markup's strengths at https://karl-voit.at/2017/09/23/orgmode-as-markup-only https://karl-voit.at/2017/09/23/orgmode-as-markup-only
  • urlwolf 5y ago
    Don't forget asciidoc. Coherent, has markup for things like video etc. It's a superior format to markdown, a pity it's so unknown
    • maleldil 5y ago
      Why do you think it's superior to Markdown?
      • mrpotato 5y ago
        I was also interested in the answer to your question. Here's[1] why AsciiDoc thinks it's better than Markdown. [1]https://docs.asciidoctor.org/asciidoc/latest/asciidoc-vs-markdown/ https://docs.asciidoctor.org/asciidoc/latest/asciidoc-vs-mar...
  • dm319 5y ago
    And vimwiki!
  • atweiden 5y ago
• Singletoned 5y ago
  I hate to be pedantic[1], but: > HTML, Markdown, JSON, LaTeX, and many other standard formats, are just plain text. On this definition, Word and Excel are just (zipped) plain text files. > Every device, including ones long gone, and ones not invented yet, can read and edit plain text. This definitely isn't true, and it kind of misses the point that there's no such thing as "plain text". It's still encoded in ascii, or utf-8, and still potentially has problems being read on other machines. It's reasonable to say that ascii has become so ubiquitous as to be universal, but it definitely wasn't always so, and won't definitely always be. [1] Okay, I love to be pedantic
  • severak_cz 5y ago
    > On this definition, Word and Excel are just (zipped) plain text files. but this is true only for newer versions. In older versions it was binary salad derived from C's data model. And even in new versions these are far from files you can safely edit by hand.
    • jibalt 5y ago
      doc and xls files have nothing to do with "C's data model".
  • jibalt 5y ago
    Older Word (doc) and Excel (xls) files aren't "zipped" and aren't plain text files. > This definitely isn't true Yes, actually it is. > and it kind of misses the point that there's no such thing as "plain text". Who here made such a point? Anyway, that's not true either. > It's still encoded in ascii, or utf-8 So, plain text files. > and still potentially has problems being read on other machines. What "other machines"? What problems? What matters is the software, not "machines". > It's reasonable to say that ascii has become so ubiquitous as to be universal, but it definitely wasn't always so I was alive when EBCDIC was common, but that isn't relevant. > and won't definitely always be. Sure, there's the heat death of the universe eventually.
  • senko 5y ago
    You can't be pedantic and then say Word and Excel are files. They're applications. On a more serious note, ascii and nowadays utf8 are customarily considered plain text, the fact that a specific charset is used doesn't mean it's not text.
• usrbinbash 5y ago
  Other advantages: They are trivial to compress, and work nice with version control.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• mro_name 5y ago
  serious question: who of you actually used plain text (not even markdown) for all texts and notes for say a month? And who changed back, why and for what occasions?
  • cobbaut 5y ago
    I've been doing this for a really long time (2003-ish). I use vim mainly, and open in Mousepad before sending text to people via e-mail (plain text email of course). Most of my knowledge base is in plain text. It is easy to 'find' and 'grep'.
• oftenwrong 5y ago
  Uncompressed PCM-based audio and bitmap-based image formats are also similarly simple, portable, and future-proof.
• dm319 5y ago
  Would love a little low-power device with a text display, nice keyboard, long battery life and a unix OS for writing.
• janvdberg 5y ago
  Obligatory link: https://www.cqse.eu/en/news/blog/no-such-thing-as-plain-text/ https://www.cqse.eu/en/news/blog/no-such-thing-as-plain-text... Plain text is great, I get the gist of Derek's post, but encoding of a plain text file is a whole other beast.
• lysecret 5y ago
  Hijacking this article. But can someone reference me a "how to make Markdown look nice tutorial" I just have zero aesthetic intuition and would love some simple guidelines to follow.
• ricg 5y ago
  > NEED HIERARCHY? Use directories — also known as folders. I really wish I could define a custom order for files in a directory. A folder hierarchy is almost an outline, but not quite. Yes I could prefix with "01", "02", and sort alphabetically, but those are cumbersome workarounds and reordering is a pain. Are there file systems that allow for a custom order of files/folders?
  • jmmcd 5y ago
    I suppose the question is where you want the sorted version to appear. In the output of `ls`? You could write a wrapper to `ls`, maybe?
    • ricg 5y ago
      In the system's file explorer (Finder/Windows File Explorer). This would give me a visual outline and the ability to open any file with its corresponding app. Imagine writing a book and using folders as chapters. You could then write individual pages with different apps, say some plain text, some Word documents, a few spreadsheets, images, videos, etc.
      • jmmcd 5y ago
        Would it be better to have something like a plain text page to hold the outline, with links to individual files?
  • timwis 5y ago
    I was just thinking about this at the weekend. One approach is to use a tool that supports [[Wiki-style Linking]], and have a kind of index/table of contents/home page for your notes.
    • ricg 5y ago
      That's what I do today in my own app. I have a "table of contents" file in each folder. Ideally the file system would support that out of the box, but maybe a first step could be to standardize such a TOC file...?
• timwis 5y ago
  Any advice on syncing with iOS? I use iA Writer, but the syncing experience is awful because iA Writer is waiting for some sync provider (e.g. Dropbox) to implement the full iOS Files API, which it appears no one has done. That leaves iCloud as the only option.
• i5heu 5y ago
  I am working on a Git bot that handles all the fancy stuff. So you don't need something else besides a git client on any device. This has a few positive sides and negative points. I think the positive sides are more relevant than the negative ones. https://github.com/i5heu/Tyche https://github.com/i5heu/Tyche
• nonrandomstring 5y ago
  Reposting what may be a relevant take on education and using text https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/joy-text-world-tech-zealotry https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/joy-text-world-t...
• lloydatkinson 5y ago
  A little ridiculous to propose that purely textual files are more portable than markdown files that are also text files. What exactly is unportable about using asterisk for bullet lists and brackets for URLs?
• fareesh 5y ago
  I write markdown via Obsidian and sync it across devices using syncthing. Works very well.
• Dave3of5 5y ago
  I write all my notes for day to day in a plain text file on my desktop much better than a notepad tbh.
• berkes 5y ago
  Same applies for bookkeeping. Though my .xls will probably outlive most applications, I'm certain that the csv version is readable decades from now. CSV is a poor format, so I'm using a plain text ledger [0] (specifically: the beancount[1] dialect). I'm quite certain that no webbased SAAS accounting tool will be around in decades. But I'm certain my (git sourced) foo.ledger files are readable and parseable for ages. And if worst comes, they are human readable, so I could even just copy it over, or parse it, manually. [0] https://plaintextaccounting.org/ https://plaintextaccounting.org/ [1] https://github.com/beancount/ https://github.com/beancount/ FWIW: I chose the beancount dialect over the simpler hledger/ledger format because of the additional support for investments/currencies/assets.
  • bstpierre 5y ago
    Yes! I came here to specifically mention plaintext accounting I'm also a beancount user. Having all of my data in plain text allowed me to write extra tooling so that I can generate higher-level reports than what beancount has built-in. (budgeting, cash flow, planning/savings, etc) That tooling also has much faster parsing than beancount. Not a knock against beancount, just proving out the point about not being locked in to a particular binary implementation.
• sebastianconcpt 5y ago
  He has a killer point: Your writing should outlive you. The End. Period. PS: Eventually, if it's important enough, it should transcend mediums, including electronic. ones
• harha 5y ago
  Quite the irony that smartphones as the most successful incarnation of modern computers are the antithesis to this. Folders are hidden, no default text editor, lock-ins everywhere you look.
  • AlanYx 5y ago
    I don't think it's necessarily ironic. I'd argue that the "success" of the mobile and web app paradigms are in large part driving the plain text movement. It's almost as if a tipping point has been reached, where the complexity thicket of siloed everything, hidden everything, subscription everything has pushed people in the other direction, more so than proprietary formats just by themselves would have been able to do.
• sublimefire 5y ago
  There is a reason we have many forms of distributing written ideas: - use math functions in the document - add visual sections for people to be able to quickly scan the document once printed - use tables - use pictures - real time collaboration involving all of the above This is great because you can choose something that fits your problem instead of being forced to type in plaintext.
• lobocinza 5y ago
  Use Markdown. There are zero disadvantages when compared to pure text files as it's plain text but with syntax and extra features on some text editors. The main advantages of writing plain text files: - source control - view/edit anywhere - doesn't get deprecated (Lindy effect) - easy to share - small size There's no reason to use suites like MS Office and Google Drive unless your team is routinely using it or you need a WYSIWYG editor for publishing. Google Drive sometimes is bad for collaboration, user has to open link, login or install app compared to just sending the damn text. And, for the latter, just do all the creative writing in plain text and later format it or you will lose countless time fixing text formatting.
  • anamax 5y ago
    Google Drive is bad because: [1] Google may deprecate it or go away. [2] Google may decide that it doesn't want you as a user.
    • seanw444 5y ago
      [3] Google may decide your data is too scrumptious to not take a peek, and possibly sell to the highest bidder.
  • pradn 5y ago
    One issue with Markdown is that there's many flavors with subtle differences in parsing/interpretation. If you're looking to be able to parse the file in the future, you have to be careful to pick a flavor with wide support or to stick to the most common features of Markdown.
    • lobocinza 5y ago
      Github Flavored Markdown (GFM) is almost a de facto standard nowadays.
• agrippanux 5y ago
  Somewhat surprised no one has mentioned self hosting NextCloud - the Notes feature supports Markdown.
• zonetti 5y ago
  I was also looking for a way to better visualize text as a set of notes while still using markdown and .txt, then I came up with the idea "Sticky notes + Markdown + Tabs, All in one .txt file"[1]. It's nothing fancy, just a prototype using electron and vanilla javascript, but it might be useful. [1] https://github.com/zonetti/zonote https://github.com/zonetti/zonote
• 0xbadcafebee 5y ago
  Am I the only person who likes writing documents that are easy to read, easy to skim, and provide complex sets of data in a concise manner, including multi-media and hyperlinks?
• bgro 5y ago
  I came to this realization a few months ago as well. I had been using one note to keep notes and it got glitchy between devices, causing things to not appear. I’ve had multiple random losses of data like that. Word documents and other special formats always break in different versions or operating systems. Or they get corrupted. Or they can’t do some basic feature like side by side comparison. Apples note app deleted all my notes a couple years ago on some version update. It was apparently hidden somewhere in the terms of service. It’s impossible to get those back or rollback. Everyone on the internet says it’s my end user fault for not reading the apple TOS standard popup before pressing the default ok button one time. There’s just an endless amount of problems. I put everything in text files in a set of folders now to sort it instead of tags that break, and nothing gets corrupted or loss. It also of course just syncs to google drive for version and backup.
• Qub3d 5y ago
  One of the ultimate plaintext champions is (unsurprisingly) John Gruber, the "inventor" of Markdown. One of my favorite facts about his site, daringfireball.com: You can add the extension .text to any permalink and it will render that page as markdown: - HTML: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2022/03/01/mozilla-on-tinder-pricing https://daringfireball.net/linked/2022/03/01/mozilla-on-tind... - Markdown: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2022/03/01/mozilla-on-tinder-pricing.text https://daringfireball.net/linked/2022/03/01/mozilla-on-tind...