The Art of Plain Text (2015)
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The Art of Plain Text (2015)
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Re: The Art of Plain Text (2015)
#2This is all well and good, but I need resources. What apps should I use to make plaintext a comfortable experience? Any help with formatting, other than this. Should I use markdown or just stick with plaintext? How do I organise my plaintext?
The problem and benefit of plaintext is that it lets the user have a lot of power, and with power comes footguns.
Re: The Art of Plain Text (2015)
#3This is all well and good, but I need resources. What apps should I use to make plaintext a comfortable experience? Any help with formatting, other than this. Should I use markdown or just stick with plaintext? How do I organise my plaintext? The problem and benefit of plaintext is that it lets the user have a lot of power, and with power comes footguns.
There is no alternative to Plaintext for me.
That said, I have 2 long term issues:
1. I've never quite found a satisfactory bulleting / indenting experience with plaintext. Markdown helps, and isn't bad. But I'm still looking for inspiration on bulleting / indenting.
2. How to intersperse the console "prompt" (e.g. >, or $, or ~), and code, and comments and commentary... such that everything is easily human readable, and also code can be easily copy pasted into the console.
Re: The Art of Plain Text (2015)
#4Kind of ironic how an article that praises plaintext shows up as absolute garbage on my iPhone with or without reader mode.
Re: The Art of Plain Text (2015)
#5> Resist the temptation to use images. If you are unable to distill the concepts or thoughts into language, then you have likely not fully understood the problem.
Not to diminish a great point, but there is no shame in a simple table or diagram, either.
Indeed, given the ambiguities of written language, doubling down on an important point with a graphic or chart reinforces that point and can help broaden the audience.
Re: The Art of Plain Text (2015)
#6This is all well and good, but I need resources. What apps should I use to make plaintext a comfortable experience? Any help with formatting, other than this. Should I use markdown or just stick with plaintext? How do I organise my plaintext? The problem and benefit of plaintext is that it lets the user have a lot of power, and with power comes footguns.
There is no alternative to Plaintext for me. That said, I have 2 long term issues: 1. I've never quite found a satisfactory bulleting / indenting experience with plaintext. Markdown helps, and isn't bad. But I'm still looking for inspiration on bulleting / indenting. 2. How to intersperse the console "prompt" (e.g. >, or $, or ~), and code, and comments and commentary... such that everything is easily human readable,…
org-mode has very nice bulleting and indenting facilities, as it descends from outline-mode. I imagine other plain text outliners might have equivalent features.
It also has good literate programming support so that you can run code from a plaintext file, which may also contain comments and capture the code output. I don't use this much, though. I prefer the usual model of programs split into files.
I got addicted to outliners by using OmniOutliner, which used to ship with Mac OS X Tiger, if I recall correctly. It supports rich text format, but also works great if you stick to plain text. It is still very well maintained and has a great design, just like everything from OmniGroup. I prefer Emacs, but OmniOutliner is also very nice and much friendlier. It is also very flexible and scriptable. It was very popular when GTD began to take off in the late 2000s, so bulleting and indenting are really well covered too.
Re: The Art of Plain Text (2015)
#7Kind of ironic how an article that praises plaintext shows up as absolute garbage on my iPhone with or without reader mode.
Page scores a 100 on lighthouse. https://pagespeed.web.dev/report?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.netme... Although search engines probably won't show this page to mobile users because it doesn't have that meta viewport tag. Also I'm not a mod but welcome to the community https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html I doubt the author is reading but I've had people analyze and talk about every detail of my html when submitting hobby projects I spent years working on and it always makes me sad when it happens.
Re: The Art of Plain Text (2015)
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is no alternative to Plaintext for me. That said, I have 2 long term issues: 1. I've never quite found a satisfactory bulleting / indenting experience with plaintext. Markdown helps, and isn't bad. But I'm still looking for inspiration on bulleting / indenting. 2. How to intersperse the console "prompt" (e.g. >, or $, or ~), and code, and comments and commentary... such that everything is easily human readable,…
org-mode has very nice bulleting and indenting facilities, as it descends from outline-mode. I imagine other plain text outliners might have equivalent features. It also has good literate programming support so that you can run code from a plaintext file, which may also contain comments and capture the code output. I don't use this much, though. I prefer the usual model of programs split into files. I got addicted to…
Org mode also let's you tangle your code chunks into separate files. And you can specify different files (or the same) for different chunks so you can kinda have programs split into files while doing everything in org. I really like this feature, I used to use Knitr but I don't think it's possible to tangle different chunks to different files.
Re: The Art of Plain Text (2015)
#9Kind of ironic how an article that praises plaintext shows up as absolute garbage on my iPhone with or without reader mode.
Read the source for plain text mode, not HTML:
view-source:https://www.netmeister.org/blog/the-art-of-plain-text.html
Re: The Art of Plain Text (2015)
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
org-mode has very nice bulleting and indenting facilities, as it descends from outline-mode. I imagine other plain text outliners might have equivalent features. It also has good literate programming support so that you can run code from a plaintext file, which may also contain comments and capture the code output. I don't use this much, though. I prefer the usual model of programs split into files. I got addicted to…
Org mode also let's you tangle your code chunks into separate files. And you can specify different files (or the same) for different chunks so you can kinda have programs split into files while doing everything in org. I really like this feature, I used to use Knitr but I don't think it's possible to tangle different chunks to different files.
I know, but I have not found this very helpful (yet?) in my workflows.