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The Plain Text Project

plaintextproject.online

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Re: The Plain Text Project

#51

Post by nixpulvis »

Emendo wrote: post #44

Plain text is great when I am on my laptop, but not as well as soon as I want to, for example, check or update my todo list on OneDrive/Google Drive on my phone or on my work computer. I have found myself moving back into proprietary formats like docx and xlsx because of the above. All I want is a folder full of markdown files (and other files that need to stay in their original format), but I not could find a way to…

Seems like there should be an app that serves as an editor for you well enough. The syncing problem is only a problem because Apple (I'm assuming your on iOS, and I don't know as much about android) doesn't give you a fucking filesystem.

I'd be pretty happy with something like ViMobile, and `git push` personally.

Re: The Plain Text Project

#52

Post by nixpulvis »

nixpulvis wrote: post #51
Emendo wrote: post #44

Plain text is great when I am on my laptop, but not as well as soon as I want to, for example, check or update my todo list on OneDrive/Google Drive on my phone or on my work computer. I have found myself moving back into proprietary formats like docx and xlsx because of the above. All I want is a folder full of markdown files (and other files that need to stay in their original format), but I not could find a way to…

Seems like there should be an app that serves as an editor for you well enough. The syncing problem is only a problem because Apple (I'm assuming your on iOS, and I don't know as much about android) doesn't give you a fucking filesystem. I'd be pretty happy with something like ViMobile, and `git push` personally.

And before anyone asks what ViMobile is... I wouldn't know, developing applications for iOS is stupidly hard.

Re: The Plain Text Project

#53

Post by [deleted] »

tekknolagi wrote: post #40
mntmoss wrote: post #33

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…

Have you considered open-sourcing this CLI app? I would benefit immensely from this tool, I think. Right now I just kind of ack and hope for the best.

[deleted]

Re: The Plain Text Project

#54

Post by coldtea »

goerz wrote: post #48
Emendo wrote: post #44

Plain text is great when I am on my laptop, but not as well as soon as I want to, for example, check or update my todo list on OneDrive/Google Drive on my phone or on my work computer. I have found myself moving back into proprietary formats like docx and xlsx because of the above. All I want is a folder full of markdown files (and other files that need to stay in their original format), but I not could find a way to…

That seems odd... at least on iOS, aren’t there a million markdown editors? What problem did you run in to?

That editing text files on mobile sucks, whereas selecting a date with the date selector, toggling an item as done with a checkbox click etc are much better...

Re: The Plain Text Project

#55

Post by autoexec »

ajvs wrote: post #46
Emendo wrote: post #44

Plain text is great when I am on my laptop, but not as well as soon as I want to, for example, check or update my todo list on OneDrive/Google Drive on my phone or on my work computer. I have found myself moving back into proprietary formats like docx and xlsx because of the above. All I want is a folder full of markdown files (and other files that need to stay in their original format), but I not could find a way to…

Markor works well on Android.

This is what I'm using now, and it seems to be working well although I'll point out that it is nagware. I'll put up with the intermittent begging for donations over ads, in-app purchases, and data mining you'd find on other apps.

Re: The Plain Text Project

#56

Post by interestica »

mrob wrote: post #38
Alex3917 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If the word starts with "http" and contains a period, it's probably a hyperlink. HN uses this assumption to automatically convert plain-text hyperlinks, and it works well enough. The real problem is dealing with SEO spam, not occasional false positives with hyperlink detection.

Sometimes auto-conversion (esp with all the TLDs and gTLDs) has weird outcomes: >> "Rudy Giuliani accuses Twitter of bias for hyperlinking text" | https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/5/18127063/rudy-giuliani-tw...

Re: The Plain Text Project

#57

Post by jchook »

mntmoss wrote: post #33

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…

eslint does this for JavaScript with the no-warning-comment rule. The general idea there goes something like "don't use code comments as a project management tool," but I tend to use eslint as a reminder to finish things for my current PR.

Also it occurred to me you could use grep or rg, something like...

  rg '\s*//\s*TODO'

Re: The Plain Text Project

#58

Post by hinkley »

anamexis wrote: post #43
hinkley wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 demonstr…

The point is that this site is literally about plain text files, i.e. not using a markup format or other adornments.

We use other media to learn and talk about every medium. So what?

You do at least recognize that you guys are bagging on OP, right?

Just let it go man. Vannevar Bush was essentially talking about hypertext (and the semantic web) in the late forties. MIME types didn’t exist until decades later. It’s a jargon term and a concept, and the jargon term is often rendered as a single word.

Re: The Plain Text Project

#59

Post by oneepic »

hsitz wrote: post #45

I didn't see any mention of in a quick look through the linked website, but the book "The Pragmatic Programmer" is one of the best resources you'll find for making the most out of text-based tools. PP goes a little beyond that, too, it's not the book's sole focus, but it's a major one, and the book is a classic: https://www.amazon.com/Pragmatic-Programmer-journey-mastery-...

I agree, but I found some of the relevant practices really hard to adopt. For example, how do you setup your tooling to put documentation in one place so it can be used for a wide variety of purposes, like code comments and relevant customer docs? Is that realistic from both the dev and user-facing perspectives?

Re: The Plain Text Project

#60

Post by zzo38computer »

I think many things can and should use plain text and yet they don't. Even, with gopher you can easily have plain text files, and simple menus which could be implemented by many different kind of user interface, you don't need to do what they do HTML try to have desktop/mobile and then it doesn't work on anything other than they expected it to be.

Many documents I will write plain text file, compatible with everything more than HTML and Microsoft Word is. I also don't like WYSIWYG when I do want text formatting.

I don't use favicon on my own server, and have it disabled on the browser. I also think "Plain Text Project" uses too much CSS too. Just you can use plain text. I don't want to use your large font sizes and narrow columns.

I use file with plain text for editing. Articles on Usenet and Unusenet too, are written plain text sometimes also with headers, but the headers are also a plain text just are more structured. Some programs have a different user interface for adjusting the headers, but I just use them same as with the rest of the text.

In addition to Usenet articles, there is many other thing that you can use a plain text file for many other things. Depending what kind of data it is, you might use just one string per line, or CSV or TSV, or JSON or YAML, or RDF (RDF/XML isn't so good, but I think the RDF Turtle format is good), etc.

In many cases I wrote my own programs because I do not like the existing ones.

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