7 ms·
Write Plain Text Files (2022)
- freddie_mercury 2y agoSo step one is "be American so everything you want to write fits in American Standard Code for Information Interchange"?
- asplake 2y agoThere are more charitable readings of that article. Did it specify an encoding?
- freddie_mercury 2y agoIf you don't specify an encoding then the claim that "Every device, including ones long gone, and ones not invented yet, can read and edit plain text." is false. Statements like that clearly shows the author means ASCII is the default everywhere.
- ghusto 2y agoI've noticed I'm fairly anti-American most of the time, but even I wouldn't have taken that away from this. Jesus.
- wodenokoto 2y agoRelated (in my mind, at least): Notebooks without lines are the plain text files of the analogue world. No lines to dictate how and what you want to write or draw.
- beermonster 2y agoOr dotted notebooks which allow the free-form, but help if you do need things to be level , line up etc.
- ReleaseCandidat 2y ago> Notebooks [...] are the plain text files of the analogue world. That's a good analogy for other reasons. Only people who can read your handwriting and know what language it should be in have a change of being able to read your "plain text". For example, have fun reading handwritten German in Kurrent (or Sütterlin): https://kurent.bastan.cz/ https://kurent.bastan.cz/ - and these are really, really legible fonts.
- gnabgib 2y agoPreviously on HN: 11 months ago [1] (14 points, 4 comments) 2 years ago [0] (739 points, 412 comments) [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30521545 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30521545 [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36591494 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36591494
- ReleaseCandidat 2y ago> Every device, including ones long gone, and ones not invented yet, can read and edit plain text. [...] But plain text? Always. Everywhere. Somebody needs to watch "Plain Text" (Dylan Beattie, NDC Copenhagen 2022) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gd5uJ7Nlvvo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gd5uJ7Nlvvo For example, have fun with ISO 8859-2 vs. Windows 1250. And add Windows 1252 for giggles. And for the ASCII-only persons: there still is EBCDIC.
- porphyra 2y agoYeah and good luck if your native language requires CJK characters, right-to-left scripts like Arabic, or whatever. Fortunately Unicode is fairly good nowadays but the olden days of the wild west of encoding was terrible.
- ReleaseCandidat 2y ago> but the olden days I welcome you to the world of printers, specially industrial label printers when using their (fast) bitmap fonts instead of e.g. true type ones.
- freddie_mercury 2y agoAnd if you're already assuming unicode (which all these "plaintext" tools do), why aren't we just using unicode bullet points instead of dashes and *? Why not just use unicode bold and italics instead of *hacks*?
- aaplok 2y ago> Why not just use unicode bold and italics instead of hacks? To be able to search and grep?
- hawski 2y agoIt is a question of the input method first and, as the sibling commenter said, grepping second. Fuzzy search could handle "-" as: "–", "—", "―", "‒" and other dashes. I input slightly more special characters on my phone as it is easier. On my computer I remember how I can easily write ° (on Linux and ChromeOS - Shift-AltGr-0) so I use it more. I don't know how to easily input a bullet point and I am too lazy to open a character table app every time it is needed. In a way it is the same with programming languages. I think there are now programming languages supporting unicode operators for example, like =, ≠, ∧, ∨, ∩, ∪. But they suffer from the same problem. How to input them, how to search for them?
- slmjkdbtl 2y agoMy only problem with all thing plain text is I need cross-platform sync cuz I write on both my phone and laptop. For these I use Simplenote which has served me super well, but still looking for solutions where I can actually write plain text "files" while have convenient syncing.
- rcarmo 2y agoSyncThing. Even on iOS.
- Nux 2y agoNextcloud Notes is what I use.
- tasuki 2y agoThese are orthogonal problems. As neighbor poster mentioned, you can use eg Syncthing to sync your plain text files.
- yencabulator 2y ago> These are orthogonal problems. Yes and no. Non-plaintext formats can choose to integrate CRDTs or Operational Transform or such to improve sync. (And, the other way around, plaintext formats are more suitable for long-term history in version control.)
- gorgoiler 2y agoWhen you have an iPhone, even text files feel like a custom proprietary format that is silo’d in its own world. My problem is that while vim, markdown to HTML, and headless browser printing to PDF all work great on my desktop Linux machine there isn’t really a way to translate this to iOS and back. If I could (a) mount my iCloud Drive in my Linux machine and (b) have a markdown centric editor on my phone then it would all work nicely. Unfortunately I feel like the lure of commercial success means Apple won’t allow the former and anyone working on the latter is doing it as a closed, proprietary, commercial system. I curse myself every day for mixing operating systems!
- LordDragonfang 2y ago> anyone working on the latter is doing it as a closed, proprietary, commercial system. But that's exactly the point of the article. It doesn't matter which app you use, or whether that specific app goes out of business or enshittifies - text files are portable to any other app. Sync it with rsync or git, they're just text. That's why so many people on this site love Obsidian despite it being closed-source - the files it uses all exist in the most open file format of all.
- ReleaseCandidat 2y agoExcept Obsidian doesn't use Markdown syntax for internal links to other Obsidian files, but (some variation of) Wiki-Syntax. This is something which I had to write my own parser for when converting Obsidian files to Org-Mode files using Pandoc https://github.com/Release-Candidate/Obs2Org https://github.com/Release-Candidate/Obs2Org
- aItr 2y agoIf you dont like wiki-style links, you should turn it off in the Settings > Files and links > Use [[Wikilinks]].
- ReleaseCandidat 2y agoIt's not about me and my configuration. The problem with Markdown is that there are so many "extensions" or variants or whatever you want to call them. But the usage of Wiki-style links instead of Markdown or HTML links is something really, well, "interesting". While it may be easier to type than markdown links, they are certainly worse to read as "plain text".
- safety1st 2y agoPlain text is the hacker's file format. You can jot down ideas every day in markdown somewhere, maybe in a daily journal that's part of your second brain. Then you can move them into documents in a Git repo. Then you can feed them into an LLM and start producing interesting functions for your personal utility library. Then you can string them into a software solution for one problem or another. This probably sounds vaguely disturbing if you are wearing a software engineer's hat. But if you're wearing a hacker's hat it's nirvana. At no point do you have to worry about being bound by the limitations of a particular tool, you are just transforming one chunk of text into another and moving those chunks around, really.
- ArtTimeInvestor 2y agoWhat is a good way to edit plain text files on a phone? Do iOS and Android ship the tools to open/edit/save plain text files these days? Edit: My question is not about third party apps. It is about what ships with iOS and plain Android.
- rcarmo 2y agoThere are a bazillion Markdown editors out there. iA Writer, Textastic, a-Shell gives you vim and other UNIX tools, etc.
- LordDragonfang 2y agoIf you're really committed to having lots of text file notes, Obsidian is probably the way to go nowadays. Sync it to a git repo (termux on Android, Working Copy on iOS) or use the first party option (or iCloud if you're in the Apple ecosystem)
- matthewsinclair 2y agoI use Emacs as my daily driver but I also have Obsidian and I use that from time to on the Mac to do things like generate PDFs or work with some of the great Obsidian extensions. To your point about editing in the phone, Obsidian has great iOS and iPadOS versions that work as well as the desktop version (albeit with some wackiness with some extensions that only work on the desktop version). In combination, this gives me a seamless setup that is all text files (.md) and that works really well across all three form factors.
- beermonster 2y agoiA Writer and it has a nice zen mode
- ghusto 2y agoiOS does not ship with a plain text editor as far as I know. I think it's _kind of_ there underneath when you open a plain text file directly, but it needs to be associated with the app that's accessing it. As an aside, iAWriter is very good. I use that paired with Syncthing for cross-platform working.
- unnervingduck 2y agoI use Obsidian myself, which simply stores text in Markdown files. It essentially shares all the pros of plain text: it'll be readable in the future, I'm not stuck with a single platform, I can sync and sort them into directories.
- DragonStrength 2y agoAnd bonus: Obsidian-like apps are their own subcategory now. Once you start using one, you can usually just open the root folder in any of the other apps and give them a spin with very little setup.
- shepherdjerred 2y agoThis depends on you not using crazy plugins specific to Obsidian that require you to write custom Markdown.
- abhinavk 2y agoWhen I switched to Obsidian, I decided to not use any third party plugins. For this very reason. Keep it simple enough that I can switch to something else later or just open the directory in Nvim or VSCode. And also because they are not sandboxed.
- eternityforest 2y agoI use Markdown a lot, but for casual everyday stuff... I really like having sync. Keep opens instantly, has Android widgets(Less important now that Google Tasks has taken over some of what I used to do with Keep), and fast search. But if I'm doing a Real Project, Markdown files in a git repo are perfect. Luckily it's very easy to just copy from Keep to plan text.
- kkfx 2y agoI do the same in org-mode, simply because pure-textual access (like grep) it's nice but limited, clickable links, attachments, executable links (elisp: but also various over link types like notmuch: for mail) are really a thing. The issue it's that they are desktop-bound, no matter what you do. You can also run Emacs on Android but such platforms are meant just to consume content and munge data from users, not to produce, so it's not a matter of UI or mere bits availability. For sharing there are a bit of limitations but that's still easy if needed. Beside that the most IT-frustration is the current state of development done to suck out all power to the user: we have IPv6 since decades, oh yes it's not perfect, but we perfectly can have a global per device and we can buy personal domain names and have subdomains on them. Unfortunately even if NOT having that is hyper-costly and challenging (NAT just to say) that's not there. FLOSS available to uncomfortable self-host is damn limited, we miss things like: - damn simple desktop screen sharing NO THIRD PARTY, no need for special configs, not need to circumvent NAT and so on - damn simple VoIP with or without video, P2P or with a personal server, but one, not to be configured with a gazzilion of things (yes we have GNU SIPWitch, Mumble, but still they are not a thing you deploy in a snap) - damn simple internet-wide file sharing (we have gazillion of options, none simple and effective) From a technological standpoint, those are perfectly possible, not done because "we need to been able to surveil users", "nobody is interested" (blatantly false, seen the popularity of crappy surveilling proprietary services we all know) and so on. Long story short: yes we can do some thing to use computers effectively, taking notes is a good example, but we potentially can do MUCH MUCH MUCH more and we could not because of some "interests". That's a real shame simply because we lose decades of evolution and we only have one life, no respawn in the IRL game.
- nicbou 2y agoI rebuild my timeline thing to use files as the database instead of PostgreSQL. Having everything as CSV, markdown, GPX etc means that I can use all the excellent software in the world to manipulate data... Or just a text editor. It's a lot easier than writing my own software to manipulate my own database. It also means that my data will outlive my software without any effort. And it means that backups are handled by my existing backup software. I also moved my website to a static site generator earlier. Same reasons. I edit that website for a living, and using Sublime Text instead of a CMS WYSIWYG editor sped up my work dramatically. I can't overstate how much better it made batch edits. https://github.com/nicbou/timeline https://github.com/nicbou/timeline
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