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Write plain text files

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Re: Write plain text files

#301

Post by Dave3of5 »

emptyparadise wrote: post #130

I disagree with the whole "NEED VISUALS OR GRAPHICS?" section. I do need visuals! I do need graphics! I'm not a typewriter, why must my flow be interrupted with me having to leave my document to open some JPEG file whenever I need to show something that isn't text? It's not like this is crazy difficult or requires proprietary apps either. Writing a modern browser may be an impossible feat but I'm certain that it woul…

> but I'm certain that it would take just a day or two to get a very simple barebones HTML renderer which supports and a couple of formatting options.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

This tells me you've never actually tried this. For example the img tag allows you to, amongst other things, render an svg.

If you want a more full spec you can see here what it takes to render an img element:

https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/images.html

Re: Write plain text files

#302

Post by kumarsw »

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 wound up writing dupver https://github.com/akbarnes/dupver after getting frustrated with the lack of versioning tools for binary files. One neat thing about .docx files and their ilk is that they are "just" zip files so it isn't hard to add special handling to pull out their contents and run deduplication over that.

Re: Write plain text files

#303

Post by CorrectHorseBat »

D13Fd wrote: post #285
CorrectHorseBat wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 some…

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

~250 pages, ~100 images, not something I expect a modern computer to struggle with. We used the web version on Linux sometimes, but I think it also happened when we didn't.

>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.

The other way is like git does it, manual merging and conflict resolving. I don't think there's a way around that once you work with enough people together on a file.

Re: Write plain text files

#304

Post by lobocinza »

Use Markdown. There are zero disadvantages when compared to pure text files as it's plain text but with syntax and extra features on some text editors.

The main advantages of writing plain text files: - source control - view/edit anywhere - doesn't get deprecated (Lindy effect) - easy to share - small size

There's no reason to use suites like MS Office and Google Drive unless your team is routinely using it or you need a WYSIWYG editor for publishing. Google Drive sometimes is bad for collaboration, user has to open link, login or install app compared to just sending the damn text. And, for the latter, just do all the creative writing in plain text and later format it or you will lose countless time fixing text formatting.

Re: Write plain text files

#305

Post by altgans »

xenodium wrote: post #211

Plain text adoption often implies markdown for a richer experience, but we also have the wonderful https://orgmode.org markup. There is no shortage of markdown-based tools on all platforms. Our org markup options, on the other hand, are very few outside of Emacs. Org markup itself is super versatile and can power lots of use-cases. I built two org-powered apps for iOS myself: https://plainorg.com https://flathabits.c…

I've been intensively using Orgmode for a year and a half (wrote my thesis in it) and then abandoned it to switch to Markdown.

Orgmode quickly turns into not-quite-plaintext with humanly impossible to read and very distracting data structs stuck inside the text. I think these were called "Properties"?

For me the beauty of plain-text is that it can be read and written in any Editor without needing syntax highlighting. Here Orgmode fails for me, as I found it unreadable and unusable without an Emacs-esque toolkit.

Re: Write plain text files

#306

Post by greyhair »

yakubin wrote: post #261
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.

The idea is pleasing, but when you specifically look at Git, its UX is rather disappointing. I'm not even talking about the CLI (after a while you can get used to it). I'm talking about resolving conflicts. If I have a sequence of changes A -> B -> C, then I change A and rebase B on top of A resolving any conflicts, then rebasing C on top of B will most of the time mean that Git will most likely ask me to resolve the…

The git diff process and conflict process really goes off the rails at times, and I have never figured that out. Modify one line in a file, and add one new line two lines after that modification, and the git diff is two 40 line chunks with some common lines, a bunch of additions, and a bunch of deletions.

Really? One new added line, and one delete/add two lines above it.

it usually works fine, it really does, but when it messes up, it really messes up big time. As long as it doesn't create a conflict, you just shrug and move on, but when it does create a conflict, holy-moley!

Re: Write plain text files

#307

Post by jollybean »

bob1029 wrote: post #41
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“ would be a multi-billion dollar startup easily. In addition to plaintext documents, I have found that a simple JSON diff is also a very effective way to demonstrate changes between 2 complex biz objects. Non-developers can cope with this as long as the differences are visually obvious (red=removed, green=new, etc) and the object graph is reasonably flat. Everything can be trivially serialized t…

Git is barely useable by technical people.

Git would be a byzantine disaster for 'everyone else'.

The graph and abstractions involved introduce enormous unnecessary complexity.

Now, 'historical changes for everyone' - yes.

But not Git. Git is very powerful, but ultimately a questionably valuable product in many cases overall. And we've now settled on it, so it's a bit difficult to displace.

Re: Write plain text files

#308

Post by anamax »

lobocinza wrote: post #304

Use Markdown. There are zero disadvantages when compared to pure text files as it's plain text but with syntax and extra features on some text editors. The main advantages of writing plain text files: - source control - view/edit anywhere - doesn't get deprecated (Lindy effect) - easy to share - small size There's no reason to use suites like MS Office and Google Drive unless your team is routinely using it or you ne…

Google Drive is bad because: [1] Google may deprecate it or go away. [2] Google may decide that it doesn't want you as a user.

Re: Write plain text files

#309

Post by bstpierre »

berkes wrote: post #294

Same applies for bookkeeping. Though my .xls will probably outlive most applications, I'm certain that the csv version is readable decades from now. CSV is a poor format, so I'm using a plain text ledger [0] (specifically: the beancount[1] dialect). I'm quite certain that no webbased SAAS accounting tool will be around in decades. But I'm certain my (git sourced) foo.ledger files are readable and parseable for ages.…

Yes! I came here to specifically mention plaintext accounting

I'm also a beancount user. Having all of my data in plain text allowed me to write extra tooling so that I can generate higher-level reports than what beancount has built-in. (budgeting, cash flow, planning/savings, etc)

That tooling also has much faster parsing than beancount. Not a knock against beancount, just proving out the point about not being locked in to a particular binary implementation.

Re: Write plain text files

#310

Post by bodge5000 »

D13Fd wrote: post #154
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.

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…

I dont use word, but I do know people that do use it (the modern version) and they still have files called "...final 3 copy(4) really final.docx".

These features are nice and all, but the thing is, most users not only don't care about using them, but don't care about even the idea of them to know they exist, so they continue with the old workflow.

Most of the time its better to get out of the users way, but in cases like this, if you truly do want to get rid of the infinite finals, they need a bit of a nudge

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