Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Plain text has been around for decades and it’s here to stay

unsung.aresluna.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 172 posts

Re: Plain text has been around for decades and it’s here to stay

#101

Post by eimrine »

perilunar wrote: post #57
arter45 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the real limit of plain text is pretty obvious: you cannot embed pictures in it. It’s like SMS vs MMS or modern chat. With pure text, you can at best add a link to a picture (which could get rotten or inaccessible for other reasons), but you cannot directly graphical content.

Sure you can: data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODdhMAAwAPAAAAAAAP///ywAAAAAMAAw AAAC8IyPqcvt3wCcDkiLc7C0qwyGHhSWpjQu5yqmCYsapyuvUUlvONmOZtfzgFz ByTB10QgxOR0TqBQejhRNzOfkVJ+5YiUqrXF5Y5lKh/DeuNcP5yLWGsEbtLiOSp a/TPg7JpJHxyendzWTBfX0cxOnKPjgBzi4diinWGdkF8kjdfnycQZXZeYGejmJl ZeGl9i2icVqaNVailT6F5iJ90m6mvuTS4OK05M0vDk0Q4XUtwvKOzrcd3iq9uis F81M1OIcR7lEewwcLp7tuNNkM3uNna3F2JQFo97Vriy/Xl4/f1cf5VWzXyym7PH hhx4dbgYKAAA7 from: https:/…

You cannot send your photo in color though.

Re: Plain text has been around for decades and it’s here to stay

#102

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

rmunn wrote: post #86
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unicode could have just been encoded statefuly with a "current code page" mark byte. With UTF and emojis we can't have random access to characters anyways, so why not go the whole way?

Yikes. That would lose the ability to know the meaning of the current bytes, or misinterpret them badly, if you happen to get one critical byte dropped or mangled in transmission. At least UTF-8 is self-syncing: if you end up starting to read in the middle of a non-rewindable stream whose beginning has already passed, you can identify the start of the next valid codepoint sequence unambiguously, and then end up being…

We've already lost all that with emojis and other characters in supplementary planes.

Re: Plain text has been around for decades and it’s here to stay

#103

Post by tolciho »

Someone wrote: post #73
cfiggers wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you only care about the UX of TUIs, that I can stand behind This is a confusing concession. Of course we love TUIs because of the UX, what other reason is there? Constraint breeds consistency and consistency breeds coherence. Take 1,000 random TUI designers and 1,000 random GUI designers and plot the variations between them (use any method you like)—the TUI designers will be more tightly clustered together becau…

> the TUI designers will be more tightly clustered together because the TUI interface constrains what's reasonable. It constrains what’s possible, not what’s reasonable. For example, one could typically fit more text on a screen by compressing it, but most of the time, that’s not the reasonable thing to do. I’m saying most of the time because of the existence of English Braille ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English…

Try a 300 baud modem for a few months and good money says something terribly modern like Get-MrParameterCount would get compressed, a lot. Here's Bill Joy on the topic:

> No. It took a long time. It was really hard to do because you've got to remember that I was trying to make it usable over a 300 baud modem. That's also the reason you have all these funny commands. It just barely worked to use a screen editor over a modem. It was just barely fast enough. A 1200 baud modem was an upgrade. 1200 baud now is pretty slow. — "Bill Joy's greatest gift to man – the vi editor". The Register. 2003.

Re: Plain text has been around for decades and it’s here to stay

#104

Post by nickjj »

Plain text is great.

20+ years of my notes are in plain text, facilitated with https://github.com/nickjj/notes.

Also been doing plain text invoicing for around 7 years with https://github.com/nickjj/invoice.

There's also Plutus https://github.com/nickjj/plutus for income and expense tracking. Couldn't be happier. All I do now is export my bank's CSV files and import them into Plutus, a few minutes later my books are done after I align some of the categories. I've done 2 years of taxes with this now.

Re: Plain text has been around for decades and it’s here to stay

#105

Post by saadn92 »

safety1st wrote: post #39
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #34

> Fun to see a contemporary take on something that peaked between 1970s–1980s Maybe that was the peak, but you had some very good TUIs in the early 1990's for DOS apps, where Windows hadn't quite completely taken over yet, but you very likely had a VGA-compatible graphics card and monitor, meaning you had a good, high-resolution, crisp and configurable-font text mode available, and also likely had a mouse . This is t…

The peak of TUIs is now. Take a look at Omarchy, an entire operating system built around terminals and config files, it's nirvana. I can only imagine how much farther down this road things may go as we enter a world where the primary interface is conversation with the machine in text. I'm sure I'll get downvoted for that last part because Reddit -- (cough) I mean Hacker News - hates AI, but I'm genuinely excited for…

Not just TUIs the whole stack is converging back to text. I run ~15 personal tools and every one that survived past the first month stores data as JSON/markdown in git repos.

Text in git gives you versioning, sync, grep, and you can hand the whole thing to an LLM with zero serialization. It's perfect for me.

Re: Plain text has been around for decades and it’s here to stay

#106

Post by [deleted] »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #102
rmunn wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yikes. That would lose the ability to know the meaning of the current bytes, or misinterpret them badly, if you happen to get one critical byte dropped or mangled in transmission. At least UTF-8 is self-syncing: if you end up starting to read in the middle of a non-rewindable stream whose beginning has already passed, you can identify the start of the next valid codepoint sequence unambiguously, and then end up being…

We've already lost all that with emojis and other characters in supplementary planes.

[deleted]

Re: Plain text has been around for decades and it’s here to stay

#107

Post by bombcar »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #34

> Fun to see a contemporary take on something that peaked between 1970s–1980s Maybe that was the peak, but you had some very good TUIs in the early 1990's for DOS apps, where Windows hadn't quite completely taken over yet, but you very likely had a VGA-compatible graphics card and monitor, meaning you had a good, high-resolution, crisp and configurable-font text mode available, and also likely had a mouse . This is t…

Norton/Midnight Commander might be close to peak TUI for me.
Post reply on HN