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The Art of Plain Text (2015)

netmeister.org

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Re: The Art of Plain Text (2015)

#11

Post by crossroadsguy »

Plaintext mania these days is like the minimal fad (that raged few years ago). Where for minimalism one does every sort of stuff, each of those, at every step defeats the very purpose of minimalism one by one.

There’s md (of different flavours; which wasn’t even needed because the conventions md is directly copied from were already sufficient - and yes, let’s argue about it!), then there’s text bundle and there are more, propriety apps have their own plaintext.

So while there actually a plaintext - the plaintext - nobody does the plaintext.

Whenever I need plaintext I just do plaintext using “-“ and tabs+- for lists etc. In case you missed almost everything is there in plaintext - line breaks, paragraph, punctuations, special characters etc. And just too many plaintext apps as well to keep you happy.

Re: The Art of Plain Text (2015)

#13

Post by lukas099 »

smitty1e wrote: post #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…

I agree.

> If you are unable to distill the concepts or thoughts into language, then you have likely not fully understood the problem.

Or maybe I have understood it, and I believe that a diagram would help my reader understand it too.

Re: The Art of Plain Text (2015)

#14

Post by remram »

every wrote: post #12

128 character US-ASCII is indeed fundamental. It is an almost verbatim translation from the teletypewriter command set: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII

In the United States, maybe. In most places requiring ASCII is an arbitrary middle finger.

Most of us have encountered the "please enter a valid name" after filling in a form.

Re: The Art of Plain Text (2015)

#15

Post by civilized »

smitty1e wrote: post #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…

It's a parochial viewpoint. You can only believe that written language is the presumptive best way to communicate if you only participate in a narrow range of activities.

Re: The Art of Plain Text (2015)

#16

Post by AA-BA-94-2A-56 »

nextos wrote: post #6
reactspa wrote: post #3

Earlier 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…

Does OmniOutliner work with plaintext?

Re: The Art of Plain Text (2015)

#17

Post by nextos »

AA-BA-94-2A-56 wrote: post #16
nextos wrote: post #6

Earlier 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…

Does OmniOutliner work with plaintext?

It has some import/export facilities, but it's not really a plain text application.

Re: The Art of Plain Text (2015)

#18

Post by eointierney »

Somebody write the art of org-mode!

I don't approach a computational problem nowadays without considering how it may be done in emacs. I'm spoiled rotten, it's an emacsystem, the utility is a learning experience.

Text is a poor approximation for understanding other people's rigour, org-mode is a communicative superpower

Re: The Art of Plain Text (2015)

#19

Post by throw0101a »

tomxor wrote: post #9
pipeline_peak wrote: post #4

Kind 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 The page hasn't yet had the necessary viewport metatag added to prevent mobile browsers doing arbitrary and selective auto adjustments to the font sizes in an attempt to make it "better". (I presume this is what you are talking about - I don't do phones, grumble grumble :wq)

Wrapping everything in a pre block isn't necessary. For example, look at Daring Fireball: [1][2] which is nicely rendered in a web browser, and very simple when you do a View Source.

[1] https://daringfireball.net

[2] https://daringfireball.net/2022/02/on_the_origin_of_the_ipho...

Re: The Art of Plain Text (2015)

#20

Post by jart »

> And please, do use a question mark at the end of a question. "Can you send me those TPS reports." is a clear sign of psychopathy.

I thought he was making a bad joke but apparently there's all this pop science that says you're a psycho if you end your texts with a period and forget to use your exclamation marks, lols, and emojis. So if you use ASCII or UCS-2, there's no way you're not a stone cold killer. I think the idea originates from a 2012 paper https://www.onlineprivacyfoundation.org/research_/Sumner_Pre... which oddly enough doesn't mention the period or question mark at all.

> Psychopathic traits were significantly positively correlated with swear words (r(2,614) = 0.187, p = Which suggests people who are foul, angry, and negative have a higher probability of being on the dark triad. However if you look at the correlations table, the dataset the researchers used suggested that psychopaths are much less likely to use exclamation marks. That's very interesting! Because I've always wondered why every corporate email since then has lots of them!

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