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Write plain text files

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Re: Write plain text files

#121

Post by innomatics »

brightball wrote: post #119
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.

One of the big things I love about Dropbox is automatic version control of the file. Google docs has a similar feature built in too I think.

I switched from dropbox to mega years ago when the former removed Linux support. TIL mega have version support so I need to enable that and try it out.

First thing I do on a new device is setup my mega shared drives - and there is a lot of plaintext files there!

Re: Write plain text files

#122

Post by _carbyau_ »

I see plain text with images/audio/video presented in their own formats, is html. Just, without the CSS and Javascript.

Adding in some script... maybe people would like https://tiddlywiki.com/

Open Source, usable on iOS and Android via apps. Is pretty much a self contained webpage but it allows drag'n'drop image files onto the edit box.

Re: Write plain text files

#125

Post by Groxx »

na85 wrote: post #97
Seirdy wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then pick a standardized dialect. Commonmark is the lowest common denominator; GFM is useful for when you need some extra features. Markdown also allows HTML for whenever you need something fancy. The advantage of markdown isn't robustness, it's simplicity. Preteens can get a handle on it in minutes when using Reddit. The main benefit that all these markup-shorthands serve IMO is getting people to add meaning semanti…

>Markdown also allows HTML for whenever you need something fancy. Indeed and therein lies what I view is Markdown's worst feature.

While I broadly agree, particularly because it feels so fuzzy about when it starts interpreting it as raw HTML and when it goes back to markdown... I'm not sure how you can really claim Org is unambiguously better (best!) when Org mode has multiple flavors of almost exactly the same kind of feature. E.g. inline HTML in Org is: https://orgmode.org/manual/Quoting-HTML-tags.html#Quoting-HT...

    @@html:@@bold text@@html:@@
Or inline LaTeX, which is arguably much worse than markdown's HTML fuzziness: https://orgmode.org/manual/LaTeX-fragments.html#LaTeX-fragme...

>To avoid conflicts with currency specifications, single ‘$’ characters are only recognized as math delimiters if the enclosed text contains at most two line breaks, is directly attached to the ‘$’ characters with no whitespace in between, and if the closing ‘$’ is followed by whitespace, punctuation or a dash.

If I understand that correctly, it means this is LaTeX:

    $a^2
    +1
    =b$
But this is not:

    $a^2
    +1
    +2
    =b$
Similarly, this is apparently an inline chunk of LaTeX: https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/39527/which-count...

    USA tends to use $123 to show dollar amounts,
    but e.g. Germany apparently sometimes uses 123$.

Re: Write plain text files

#126

Post by prashantsengar »

rattray wrote: post #40
elteto wrote: post #20

This is one of the main strengths of Obsidian, which I have been using lately and I’m extremely happy with: everything is just Markdown files in some folder on disk. Zero danger of lock in. You can have a disk hierarchy if you desire, or trust that search will find you what you are looking for. For me search works fairly well and if I need something extra I can just grep/sed/awk. Plus it has the features that a simpl…

I love Obsidian, but I'm now beginning to move many of my documents to Notion for sharing with a team. I really wish Obsidian, or something like it, worked well for teams. Maybe it's on their roadmap, I'm not sure.

Have you tried Athens Research? [0]

It is open source and everything is stored locally but not in markdown files. You can self-host the desktop app to share notes.

[0]: https://github.com/athensresearch/athens

Re: Write plain text files

#127

Post by MarkSweep »

Another advantage layers on the source control: many source code management services will render your markdown and give you a search interface. GitHub popularized it. But other hosts like Azure Devops and GitLab support this as well. You can make a relatively pleasant document management system on top of this.

You can even run this on your own computer without an internet connection. Working Copy on iOS supports. Gollum, originally created by Tom Preston-Werner, strives to be compatiable with GitHub's wiki feature [2]. For my part, I've been learning Rust by writing a clone of Gollum called Smeagol [3].

Though really the point of the original article is: all these tool don't matter. Your plain text files can live longer than any of particular tool and continue to be useful.

[1] https://workingcopyapp.com/

[2] https://github.com/gollum/gollum

[3] https://smeagol.dev/

Re: Write plain text files

#129

Post by disruptthelaw »

elteto wrote: post #20

This is one of the main strengths of Obsidian, which I have been using lately and I’m extremely happy with: everything is just Markdown files in some folder on disk. Zero danger of lock in. You can have a disk hierarchy if you desire, or trust that search will find you what you are looking for. For me search works fairly well and if I need something extra I can just grep/sed/awk. Plus it has the features that a simpl…

And easy linking and bi-directional linking. Once you experience these two features it’s very hard to imagine notes without it. That’s the main reason I couldn’t go with the authors workflow of just plain text files.

Re: Write plain text files

#130

Post by emptyparadise »

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 would take just a day or two to get a very simple barebones HTML renderer which supports and a couple of formatting options.

At this point I wish we had a tty which supports variable width and size text and inline images and video. Then I could be happy.

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