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Write plain text files

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Re: Write plain text files

#241

Post by usrbinbash »

cpressland wrote: post #224
usrbinbash wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that there's no such thing as "plain text" Please show me a computing device that cannot deal with ASCII. And UTF-8 has, by now, reached a level of ubiquity that encompasses almost everything in IT as well.

The Commodore 64 I’m building could probably be taught how to read ASCII with enough effort, but out of the box it can’t. I appreciate modern computers conform to standards, but that doesn’t mean that these standards have always existed, or will always exist.

> but out of the box it can’t.

Even if such a device needs to be used, decoding ascii is a trivial lookup operation, not remotely comparable to decoding some arcane binary format, or a convoluted XML-derived format such as they are used in WYSIWYG editor formats.

Yes, text relies on an encoding standard. So do numbers btw. (big/little endian, 2s/1s complement, sign/magnitude, floating-point representations), element enumeration (0 vs 1 based indexing) and even boolean logic (eg.: 0 is true in bash, everything else is false)

At the end of the day, computers represent only 2 states: On and Off. Everything beyond that, needs an encoding.

And some of these encodings are, at this point, both so universal and simple, that they can be considered as much a standard of the IT world, as 0 and 1. ASCII is one of those.

Re: Write plain text files

#242

Post by 0xad »

nextlevelwizard wrote: post #231
sdoering wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 head…

Then the whole article loses all of its meaning. If you find yourself writing Python in Word something has gone so horribly wrong there is no saving you. Just use the good old file program and you'll see that in any coherent world we classify python, php, html, and js files as different from actual plain text files. This very much feels like you are trying to argue tea is same as plain water.

No.

Open up a word document (.docx) in hex editor (head -80 foo.docx | xxd) and you'll see it's not a plain file on a binary level. Now do the same with any python, php, html, and js files and you'll see that they're plain files.

That's the difference that Derek is talking about.

Re: Write plain text files

#243

Post by vertis »

phreack wrote: post #139
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.

I once thought git for humans would be a great idea but never got around to speccing it out. Later on, a lawyer friend showed me the software they used 'for backup' (that they paid thousands per month for) and it turned out everything about it was just exactly like SVN. The terminology was different, the UX was laser focused to the intended users, but at the end of the day it was commits, syncs, merging, pretty much…

Enterprise Content Management like EMC Documentum has this sort of thing baked in (it's been a long time, but they're definitely on top of it). But that's for big companies.

Re: Write plain text files

#244

Post by account-5 »

urlwolf wrote: post #227
account-5 wrote: post #177

Zim-Wiki is my go-to as it pretty much manages everything for you. It mentions an advantage of not fiddling with formatting but I constantly switch between wiki markup, markdown, and even ini format; I can't help it.

I was a big fan of zim, but I have to admit it's falling behind the times (search is poor, graph view not useful, no collaboration, no mobile, tags are second class etc) so I reluctantly moved away from zim to amplenote.

That's the thing though, I'm only interested in offline first free software. I see no point in paying someone for my notes and I'm not collaborating with anyone on them.

With zim everything it just text and folders, easily done manually if I wanted it on mobile, but for that I just use markor.

Re: Write plain text files

#245

Post by autoexec »

mythz wrote: post #142

For several years I was an avid notepad.exe + plain text files practitioner for capturing any note but have switched to using https://notable.app for capturing any adhoc notes. It has the same in spirit & benefits of maintaining plain-text .md files in a static directory but has all the niceties of rich markdown, embeds, attachments, search and metadata captured in .md frontmatter to organize and tag notes with categ…

notable seems a lot like zim. I see Notable has (or will have) a paid subscription plan, on-line features like sharing, cloud synchronization, and encryption, but I didn't see a privacy policy anywhere.

Re: Write plain text files

#246

Post by vertis »

cytzol wrote: post #51
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…

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?

square bracket syntax is fairly well used in wikis. While there are varying degrees of user experience if you step away from Obsidian, it's still readable. You can go and convert the links to []() either inside Obsidian with a plugin or later with a script.

You'll be able to get access to it in 20 years, even if not in a shiny UX friendly way. Which is more than can be said for some of the really old notes I took in proprietary pieces of software.

Re: Write plain text files

#248

Post by pfix »

wodenokoto wrote: post #143
hammyhavoc wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can use it free, mate. Just sync your markdown files via your favourite provider, or your own WebDAV, e.g. Nextcloud, or use a free sync plugin. There's even git plugins if you're a fellow nerd that wants version control.

According to the license, you can't use it commercially without the commercial license, and I think the license is very clear that work related notes are included in commercial definition: > You need to pay for Obsidian if and only if you use it for revenue-generating, work-related activities in a company that has two or more people. Get a commercial license for each user if that's the case. Non-profit organizations…

But then I consider $50 not that much for a software that helps you earning your salary. And it becomes tax deductable this way.

If it doesn't help your work or a free markdown editor provides you the same value, you have your answer.

As I use it for my job I consider it worth the 50 bucks. I still would prefer it to bee FOSS, though (and be willing to pay, anyway) - as then I knew even the software might be still around when the company behind it is gone.

A lot of utility with obsidian comes from the plugins from the community (e.g. excalidraw) and even though they might store their stuff also on your disk as text files, the utility of that eco system is gone as soon as one switches (or changes, or requires a different file format for the text files or whatnot)

Re: Write plain text files

#249

Post by vertis »

wolverine876 wrote: post #111
syntheweave wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

If you've tried opening up lots of epub files (I have), you'll soon learn that there are a huge range of layouts and ugliness under the hood. Yes it's HTML, and therefore you can preserve a good portion of the knowledge even if you didn't have an ereader (though you need zip), but it would still be a pain to extract and reformat at scale.

Disclaimer: I probably spend too much time thinking about this from a 'long now' perspective.

Re: Write plain text files

#250

Post by vishnugupta »

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.

> “Git for everything“

Just to show how useful this is here’s Indian Constitution with amendments as commits:

https://github.com/anoopdixith/TheConstitutionOfIndia

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