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Write plain text files

sive.rs

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Re: Write plain text files

#281
post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So when you need to remember a user/password combo for a new device, offline doorbell maybe, or a parcel number, or the address of a friend, then you record a 4K video instead of writing it in a text file? Plain text just works, everywhere, all the time.

> Plain text just works, everywhere, all the time. No it doesn't. Try a plain text description of an electronic circuit vs a circuit diagram. Try a a plain text instruction sheet vs an illustrated one. Try plain text sheet music vs actual sheet music. Try a mathematical plot vs plain text tables. Try concept drawings of product vs text descriptions. Try construction drawing vs plain text descriptions. I could go on a…

> No it doesn't. Try a plain text description of an electronic circuit vs a circuit diagram.

I'm not an EE, but there's SPICE for regular electronic circuits and SysVerilog et al for logic circuits. Math can be typeset in LaTeX, though its plain text readability depends on the formula. Category theory diagrams can be written in a simple language. Sheet music is some sort of XML, though I imagine there could be a more human writable/readable plain text format for this too. There was also a recent post about Markdown diagrams. And of course, code is still entirely text.

Much of what you mentioned can be described in a concise, portable text-based language. Though these documents are readable as text, they can be further rendered for best readability. Luckily, many can also be live previewed.

Re: Write plain text files

#282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's 2022 and people like the blog author are all "who needs screenshots? who needs audio? who needs colours? who needs fonts or styles? who wants to see their handwriting strokes? who needs metadata? I use text because it's 1970!". Hello? 4K video in my pocket, structured data streaming out of every system around me, all I'm supposed to want to capture is plain text? What a paucity of information, of detail, what an…

So when you need to remember a user/password combo for a new device, offline doorbell maybe, or a parcel number, or the address of a friend, then you record a 4K video instead of writing it in a text file? Plain text just works, everywhere, all the time.

[deleted]

Re: Write plain text files

#283

> 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,…

Why can a vapid blog post from a famous person make the front page, but a serious, if slightly aggressive, response to it gets downvoted? Did everyone just want to circle jerk about how they too are just like famous person?

I think "vapid" is generous. The author seems to have no grasp of concepts like encoding, representation, and medium. And the other responses to the critical comment (not troll) quite miss the point.

I have a large amount of digitized data, including programs I first hand wrote on paper and then transferred to punch cards, poems written on paper and later typed in, photographs I've scanned, photographs I've taken digital photos of, scanned books and articles that contain text in various languages along with images, digitized music and videos, etc. Some of these consist of "plain" (whatever that means) text and some don't. I've been accumulating this data since the 1960s. When I think about my collection and the ways I manage it, and my knowledge of encodings, representations, and media, and then read this article, my most polite response is ... smh.

That said, I think there is a valid point in all that confusion, and it is stated by several of the comments on the article: use Markdown or something similar (but MD is usually the best choice) when you can rather than Word or other proprietary binary formats. But MD is not "plain" text.

Re: Write plain text files

#285
post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly I think modern Sharepoint/OneDrive based .docx files have already leapfrogged git for the average user. In an office environment, modern MS Word gives you a really nice version history, with automatic or manual/named versions, plus multi-user simultaneous editing, with a slick and fast UI. It’s even cross platform - I send a coworker a link to a document, and they can open it and work on Word for Windows whi…

After not using Word for years we've been using it for a few months now for a project, expecting it would be decent. While some of the ideas are great, the overall experience was pretty bad. Leaving autosave on often slowed down Word to an unworkable pace and after a few other issues (I'm not exactly sure what, wasn't involved) we just made sure only one person at a time works on the document. Some other annoying sma…

Were you using it on Linux or something? Or maybe with very large documents?

I use it every day and really haven’t had slowness issues, even when running via Parallels on the Mac side. Of course, typically my docs are I have seen undo history go away when edits collide with multiple users, but that’s really the only way it could work. And you can still view old versions of the doc if you need to retrieve/restore something.

MS Word as a whole is definitely very far from flawless, but it’s still better than the alternatives I’ve seen, and it’s extremely entrenched. That’s why it’s hard to see “git for office docs”succeeding.

Re: Write plain text files

#286
post #266
post #253

> NEED HIERARCHY? Use directories — also known as folders. I really wish I could define a custom order for files in a directory. A folder hierarchy is almost an outline, but not quite. Yes I could prefix with "01", "02", and sort alphabetically, but those are cumbersome workarounds and reordering is a pain. Are there file systems that allow for a custom order of files/folders?

I was just thinking about this at the weekend. One approach is to use a tool that supports [[Wiki-style Linking]], and have a kind of index/table of contents/home page for your notes.

That's what I do today in my own app. I have a "table of contents" file in each folder. Ideally the file system would support that out of the box, but maybe a first step could be to standardize such a TOC file...?

Re: Write plain text files

#287

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!

Been using it on Linux for many years but it does feel like their Linux support has gotten worse.

Re: Write plain text files

#288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's 2022 and people like the blog author are all "who needs screenshots? who needs audio? who needs colours? who needs fonts or styles? who wants to see their handwriting strokes? who needs metadata? I use text because it's 1970!". Hello? 4K video in my pocket, structured data streaming out of every system around me, all I'm supposed to want to capture is plain text? What a paucity of information, of detail, what an…

So when you need to remember a user/password combo for a new device, offline doorbell maybe, or a parcel number, or the address of a friend, then you record a 4K video instead of writing it in a text file? Plain text just works, everywhere, all the time.

What about a note of the dimensions of a room, furniture, or piece of equipment? Suddenly you need a diagram.

Re: Write plain text files

#289
post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So when you need to remember a user/password combo for a new device, offline doorbell maybe, or a parcel number, or the address of a friend, then you record a 4K video instead of writing it in a text file? Plain text just works, everywhere, all the time.

> Plain text just works, everywhere, all the time. No it doesn't. Try a plain text description of an electronic circuit vs a circuit diagram. Try a a plain text instruction sheet vs an illustrated one. Try plain text sheet music vs actual sheet music. Try a mathematical plot vs plain text tables. Try concept drawings of product vs text descriptions. Try construction drawing vs plain text descriptions. I could go on a…

Some good points here. In defence of the original point, you could extend the "plain text everywhere" to "open formats, as text-based as possible" and keep the spirit. I'm personally in the "markdown for most things, with inline images" camp (with regards my own notes).

This one caught my eye tho:

> Try plain text sheet music vs actual sheet music.

Conceptually, "sheet music" *is* a plain text of music.

I accept that technically it would need to be implemented very differently as we haven't got ASCII or UNICODE for sheet music (AFAIK). You could probably do it with an XML language, or at a stretch YAML, and it'd be close human-readable and still vaguely plain text.

Re: Write plain text files

#290
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“ would be a multi-billion dollar startup easily. Worked on a “Git for Word” project [1], which is currently on hold. The diff part was manageable, though not trivial to get diffs that make sense for prose/regular text. The hard parts are UX/UI (making Git concepts transparent to “normal” users) and merging. Yet without automatic merging, branching is not very convenient. Would love to collaborat…

I’ve had better than expected success with diffing word files by converting them to markdown via pan doc. It’s nowhere near perfect as you lose nearly all formatting, but if only the actual text content is changing it allows you to automate the display of those changes.
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