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Write plain text files

sive.rs

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Re: Write plain text files

#111

Post by wolverine876 »

syntheweave wrote: post #94
wolverine876 wrote: post #12

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+ yea…

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 tha…

Is SVG too complex to be portable across systems and preserved across time?

It does remind me that EPUB, the ebook format, has potential: It's essentially, as I understand, HTML, CSS, and some metadata files, structured according to the specification, all in a zip file. It's already a standard, though AFAICT not quite stable.

https://www.w3.org/publishing/groups/epub-wg/

Re: Write plain text files

#113

Post by paxys »

gotorazor wrote: post #112

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?

Plain text doesn't have to mean ASCII. Every major OS/text editor supports UTF-8.

Re: Write plain text files

#114

Post by galaxyLogic »

I like to write text-files whose content is wrapped into 
 -tag.
After the pre-section I add:

pre
{ font-family: Verdana;
}

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 
 opening tag.
You can wrap parts of the content into other tags like  for headers.

Re: Write plain text files

#116

Post by jamesgeck0 »

strken wrote: post #32

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.

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.

Re: Write plain text files

#117

Post by wodenokoto »

elteto wrote: post #20

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 simpl…

I do wish they had a cheaper commercial tier that maybe didn’t offer priority support or something.

$50/year puts you next to some good developer tools, that already do markdown pretty well, and I just don’t see the point of writing notes if they’re not also for work.

I’m sure it’s worth it once you have 100s or 1000s of notes by i somehow feel like it’s a bit of a too big pill to swallow in the beginning.

Re: Write plain text files

#118

Post by keithnz »

elteto wrote: post #20

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 simpl…

yeah, likewise, I have been using markdown and folders of files for ages, started to use Obsidian and it provides a nice editor for that, and yes, it even has a vim mode!

Re: Write plain text files

#119

Post by brightball »

imgabe wrote: post #35

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.

One of the big things I love about Dropbox is automatic version control of the file.

Google docs has a similar feature built in too I think.

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