The Plain Text Project

It’s much harder to build good search engines on top of plain text though, because it’s not possible to deterministically detect hyperlinks within text.

Recently I decided that I was going to solve the problem of: I easily write inline TODO comments while I work on code, but then have difficulty keeping track of them and getting my head back into the state of things later. While there is IDE support for such things, it's usually not exactly the right interface I want.

So I made a tiny CLI app that scans the source for TODO and FIXME lines and presents a menu of files, containing the number of items to work on in each. Then I type in which file I want to work on and it instantly reports all relevant lines, plus successive comment lines. All I have to do is punch in the line number and start working.

I felt a kind of stress relief almost instantly after doing this. It's better than Trello for me.

If I need to add additional kinds of data sources, many syntaxes, etc. it might become a bit more complex, but still managable as long as there's an API to get some plaintext lines out. It's basically following up on the hypothesis of a lot of information tools today: it isn't the data generation that's the issue, but the filtering.

I do my self-employment accounting using an accounting system I wrote myself in my own Lisp dialect (TXR Lisp), making heavy use of its object system. It works very well.

The entry is done in a file called "data.tl", using simple function calls and object construction. That is then checked into Git after every new transaction.

It does everything: deducting income tax, expenses, GST, capital cost allowance for writing off depreciation on equipment, ... And it has decent columnar format reporting for querying the accounts.

Invoices to clients are generated in HTML + CSS + SVG logo, which can render to a very polished PDF.

I based the system on something I call "zero sum accounting". Every transaction contains 2 or more deltas (N-entry, not just double entry), which represent entries going into various accounts. These deltas must add up to zero: like voltages around a circuit. So for instance a single transaction representing a paid invoice gets split up into an income tax withholding account, gst, account, equity account, cash account, and others, in a single transaction. Negative-running accounts represent outside interests in the business: e.g. the equity account (owner's interest in the business) runs negative, and so would an account representing a bank loan (lender's interest in the business). Positive accounts are what the business has, like cash or value of assets. The confusing "debit" and "credit" terminology is completely avoided.

Sometimes I forget that even HN has people who will happily argue about absolutely anything.

Plain text is printed in a physical surface by mechanical or manual means, but you don’t seem to have a problem with pixels.

Footnotes, figures, and bibliographies all refer to material out of time and space. Frequently you had to bust ass to make use of them but they were there. And they were replaced with something demonstrably better.

So you want a website about plain text with no hypertext at all where you have to copy and paste URLs in order to get past the landing page, in order to have a plain text experience. Maybe bullet journals should only be described in bullet journals and embroidery instructions be embroidered onto fabric.

> some of you are thinking, “but John, you just said there’s no difference between geeks and nerds,” and to you I say, “shut up nerds.” - John Hodgeman

Nice idea. The JetBrains family of IDEs (RubyMine, IntelliJ, etc.) even have this as a built-in TODO panel that shows files with TODO and FIXME comments (syntax is configurable).