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Write plain text files

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Re: Write plain text files

#181

Post by revorad »

slmjkdbtl wrote: post #174

I've been using simplenote and kinda wanted to transition to plain text, the only thing stopping me is the mobile desktop sync workflow which simplenote handles really nicely. Does anyone have any good ideas?

Glad to see another simplenote user in the wild! I’ve been using it for years, absolutely love it.

For me it’s not just the automatic syncing, but having a good app on all platforms that I really like using.

On my Mac, I also run a script that commits the simplenote db to git every hour or so and pushes it to Github. It's basically like a JSON file. So I don’t worry about simplenote getting shut down.

Re: Write plain text files

#182

Post by lifeisstillgood »

thrwawy283 wrote: post #151
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.

Okay. Agree entirely. I love some of the collaborative nature of Microsoft Teams and CRDT editing Word/Excel, but I'm usually pretty remote. Text over a tenuous WAN connection is ideal. I work at a government agency and I was /just today/ getting them to review and approve Git and VS Code for our staff use - and pandoc. A couple years ago we never would have gotten open-source software approved. I wish I knew of an e…

>>> There's a market for making pandoc better.

Some thoughts:

1. Policy makers think they write policy in English (or other human language). But more and more it is the software.

2. "policy engines" aren't going to cut it - we need to introspect code to decide what the code does - and translate that back to policy.

3. at my work the best solution i have got is using unit tests to explain what the policy is based on test comments - and again that's using english and again it's terrible ("best")

I think the real solution is both wider software literacy so that discussion happen "in code" and code that is more like policy (composable functional languages are thus likely to be useful here)

But great to hear you are taking any steps at all - would an HN letter writing campaign to your ministers help?

Re: Write plain text files

#183

Post by simion314 »

testermelon wrote: post #161
IceWreck wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isnt docx binary ? So git is storing a new version of the file every commit. That way too much storage space youre wasting.

I've heard somewhere that docx is actually gzipped xml. But I never really confirmed that myself. But it's binary once gzipped, so your point still stands.

>I've heard somewhere that docx is actually gzipped xml. But I never really confirmed that myself.

docx and epub are zip files, you can rename them with a .zip at the end and open to see what is inside. It might not be as simple to zip them back, at least for epub is very important to zip the files in a certain order but I forgot the details, but is easy to do from command line.

Re: Write plain text files

#184

Post by hkdobrev »

I was sick of all these services and apps with proprietary formats as well and starting writing markdown files organised in folders.

I've started a simple Bash utility for organising, searching notes and extracting TODOs out of them: https://github.com/hkdobrev/notetaker

I'd be glad if someone finds it useful.

Re: Write plain text files

#185

Post by hutrdvnj »

I think the easiest thing to write in is markdown. It allows you to define chapters, sections, subsections, lists, italic, bold, ... so all the basic things most of us would like to have anyways. It's very easy to read without a markdown renderer as plaintext for yourself and for others. You can automatically convert it to HTML, create a presentation, create a book, all quiet easy.

Re: Write plain text files

#186

Post by JonathonW »

testermelon wrote: post #161
IceWreck wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isnt docx binary ? So git is storing a new version of the file every commit. That way too much storage space youre wasting.

I've heard somewhere that docx is actually gzipped xml. But I never really confirmed that myself. But it's binary once gzipped, so your point still stands.

Docx (and pptx, and xlsx) is a zipped (not gzipped) composite of several XML files plus any other attached resources. It extracts out to a whole folder structure.

Definitely binary once compressed, though, and even when extracted not an easy format to parse. It might be XML, but it’s still representing the full complexity of an MS Office document.

Re: Write plain text files

#187

Post by sdoering »

nextlevelwizard wrote: post #179

But author is not writing plain text files. As he shows at the end he is clearly writing some mixture of HTML and some custom language that he uses to parse title, tags, and date. I do agree that unless absolutely needed you shouldn't tie yourself to proprietary formats, but unless you are writing simple notes you probably want more functionality out of your files than actual plain text file can provide at which poin…

Code I write, be it python, php, HTML or JS is still plain text as a format. I can open any of these code documents in any dumb text editor.

The fact that some other tool can do more with these files, parse them, execute them, "extract" some logic from them isn't relevant to the fact that I can open, read and edit these files as a pure and plain text file.

Therefore adding parsable parts/logic to files like YAML headers (or any self created style) doesn't make these files 'non plaintext'.

Following your logic would mean that doing any markup in a text file would make it somehow 'non plaintext'. I remember old Readme files with headlines being underlined by adding a new line full of - - - - (dashes). And stuff like this. Because these could theoretically be used to parse the files and extract headlines from the text.

Re: Write plain text files

#188

Post by orhmeh09 »

innomatics wrote: post #121
brightball wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I switched from dropbox to mega years ago when the former removed Linux support. TIL mega have version support so I need to enable that and try it out. First thing I do on a new device is setup my mega shared drives - and there is a lot of plaintext files there!

Dropbox removed Linux support? It seems to work fine for me on arch Linux with btrfs.

Re: Write plain text files

#190

Post by innomatics »

orhmeh09 wrote: post #188
innomatics wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I switched from dropbox to mega years ago when the former removed Linux support. TIL mega have version support so I need to enable that and try it out. First thing I do on a new device is setup my mega shared drives - and there is a lot of plaintext files there!

Dropbox removed Linux support? It seems to work fine for me on arch Linux with btrfs.

It was sync specifically, and four years ago. Maybe it works now.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17732912

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