Write plain text files
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Write plain text files
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Re: Write plain text files
#2I've tried a lot of different things over decades. And, after countless experimentation, I'm still at the same place...
I store data all over the place.
I have Evernote for long book notes and tracking financial data.
I'm using notion right now as my base of notes for learning how to build a cabin (toggles and embedding videos is wonderful).
I tried to really use roam and its off-shots for a while but could never really get into it.
And i use a new txt file all the time. Anytime I don't know what I need or going to do. And 90% of the time, I never look at them again but they're all in my one synced folder.
At the end of the day, I keep thinking I'll settle on one solution but I'm doubtful that's ever going to be true.
Re: Write plain text files
#3I've tried a lot of different things over decades. And, after countless experimentation, I'm still at the same place... I store data all over the place. I have Evernote for long book notes and tracking financial data. I'm using notion right now as my base of notes for learning how to build a cabin (toggles and embedding videos is wonderful). I tried to really use roam and its off-shots for a while but could never rea…
> and 90% of the time, I never look at them again
So, you’re a note squirrel. So am I. I’ve stopped caring or stressing out about it. I just accept that I’m never going to be overly organized or systematic.
I do keep all of my notes in a /notes folder or sub folder so that fuzzy find works nicely. That’s the extent of my organization.
Re: Write plain text files
#4I've tried a lot of different things over decades. And, after countless experimentation, I'm still at the same place... I store data all over the place. I have Evernote for long book notes and tracking financial data. I'm using notion right now as my base of notes for learning how to build a cabin (toggles and embedding videos is wonderful). I tried to really use roam and its off-shots for a while but could never rea…
Do you know https://obsidian.md/? It's a note taking app with plugins. There are some for todos and excalidraw for drawing on whiteboards.
Re: Write plain text files
#5I like it, it was fun to see the plain version at the end too.
Outliving formats is an interesting angle. I'm sure some of us know people who still use proprietary formats and software from the 1990s or earlier. They keep backups, but they keep using what worked for them.
Some years back I wrote a modernizing-controller for a Dreamweaver site behind a traditional craftsman's business that is doing pretty well, especially with the help of the web. The modernizations I needed to plan for were so many that they had to think long and hard about years remaining until retirement. The scope changes I received were super awkward because I could feel their frustration with new ways of doing things. It was strange to see things like the .dwt Dreamweaver formats still in use. They also used other proprietary software & formats.
But I do find it hard to imagine that text files (in the sense of the article) would have run the site at any point. Text files do take a bit of a stoic philosophy to really grok at some level IMO, and this has been true since maybe the '70s? The thing about text is, first of all the information is the expression framework. This is backwards for a lot of psychologies out there. The emotional components show up as decoration. Font color schemes, etc.
The article also mentions mind mapping and other tools. Those can be really important as a way to express what is inside the mind as a completely different type of process. Mind maps in particular address a problem of categorical expression, in a breadth-first context. This makes the visual itself a very useful format-as-framework. I find that I use them just enough (I have my own variant) that I keep a semi-yearly Freeplane file at hand even though I mostly use text.
Anyhoo. :-) Lots of good points in there. Thanks for sharing the article.
Re: Write plain text files
#6i tend to make an exception for sqlite, but otherwise i’m much the same.
Re: Write plain text files
#7I've been using iA Writer for all of my text and writing needs for many years, couldn't be happier.
Re: Write plain text files
#8I tend to go for (simple) markdown rather than pure text files. It can be rendered into some fancy format, but the source code is also readable to humans. With chat apps like Slack and Discord taking it up, even non-technical people tend to understand what it means to put emphasis on something. You get the benefits of plain text with the ability to empathise, without fancy formats. Such a format also enforces paragraphs and lists to be consistent, which is great for easy of reading.
There are other, similar slightly-more-than-plain-text formats (RST is common among some communities, for example) with the same benefits, and everyone can pick their favourites and use them freely because in the end these formats are easy to parse as a human.
Re: Write plain text files
#9Is there a modern text editor that only supports ASCII, so I can take my plain text notes and store pages and pages of them in one or two KB?
Re: Write plain text files
#10This is good advice, but (as he notes halfway through the post) "plain text" comes in a lot of forms.
I would also add that for life-long storage of "whatever" you do probably also need attachments. (I guess we could say “plain files”. And for those, more JPEG/PDF than .doc/.cwk (Hi mom! :) )
For a couple decades I used my IMAP mail server's "Drafts" mailbox as a kind of poor man's Notion|OneNote|Evernote|Blahblahnote. It supported plain text, and attachments. It was enough, and more importantly, not too much.
Today, I do use things like Notion and other locked-in products, just to know the landscape (sure has gotten better since the 1990s! wow!), but if it is anything more important than a grocery list (such as, say... scraps of my novel, baby name lists, pet name lists, boat name lists...) I make sure to use something like Logseq, Marktext, Obsidian, or yeah, just .txt.