Only the formats which used by majority will long live.
Write plain text files
71–80 of 425 posts
Re: Write plain text files
#72Another 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.
Isn't that what Google Docs does already?
I like this too, easily share is really a huge plus for any type of format text.
Re: Write plain text files
#73Another 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.
> “Git for everything“ would be a multi-billion dollar startup easily.
Version control with online MS Office and Google Docs seems to be going pretty strong.
Re: Write plain text files
#74I 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+ yea…
iVim is a very nice port of vim to iOS that is regularly updated: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ivim/id1266544660
Re: Write plain text files
#75I'm a big believer in this, but I use 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).
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).
Re: Write plain text files
#76Another 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.
> The number of files with names like “Report Final Final draft v3.docx” is truly staggering. iirc this was the original pitch for Dropbox > “Git for everything“ would be a multi-billion dollar startup easily. Dropbox is valued at 8.5 billion
Dropbox version history is limited to 30 days (free plan) or 180 days (paid plan)[1].
I like Dropbox, but for documents, 30 days worth of version history is not fantastic.
[1]: https://help.dropbox.com/files-folders/restore-delete/versio...
Re: Write plain text files
#77> 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,…
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?
Re: Write plain text files
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Serious question: how do you square your third paragraph with your first? That is, if you're using Obsidian's features like [[square bracket link syntax]], or #tags, or inline images, aren't you effectively locked in to editors that support the same set of features?
Not really -- you're only locked in to the extent that Obsidian makes those things easy If Obsidian went away, I'd still have a bunch of text files that I understood, and I'd know that I could find things tagged with #foo by using grep, that the [[links]] just mean to open links.md, that an image should be opened in a browser, etc.
Additionally, it’s pretty to extend most Markdown parsers with extended syntax. The worst thing that happens is you have to fork a parser to add extended syntax…which isn’t so bad.
Re: Write plain text files
#79This 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 simpl…
I love Obsidian, but I'm now beginning to move many of my documents to Notion for sharing with a team. I really wish Obsidian, or something like it, worked well for teams. Maybe it's on their roadmap, I'm not sure.
How is notion? I heard it was slow?
Also, is real time collaboration a game changer or a gimmick?
I used to think the former, but was questioning it recently.
What would be lost with syncthing + obsidian for your team or maybe something that does autocommit like fossil for probable conflicts?
Re: Write plain text files
#80Another 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.
> The number of files with names like “Report Final Final draft v3.docx” is truly staggering. iirc this was the original pitch for Dropbox > “Git for everything“ would be a multi-billion dollar startup easily. Dropbox is valued at 8.5 billion
The original pitch was "throw away your usb drive", I don't think file history came about until after 2010, but I'm not too sure and modern Google makes it impossible to find anything older than 2 years ago...