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

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

#121

Post by gf000 »

krautsauer wrote: post #60
gf000 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why? You easily have 4k pixels, why use a tiny subset of those in a very inefficient way? We have proper hardware to make a bunch of these computations actually fast, and yet we should stuck with drawing relatively expensive text everywhere? If you only care about the UX of TUIs, that I can stand behind (though mostly as a guideline, it doesn't fit every workflow), but you can do that with a proper GUI just as we…

I'm curious: Do you have a nice set of GUI applications that come with the UX you'd expect of TUIs? (I'm not actually sure what the UX of TUIs is I love so much. Relative simplicity / focus on core features? Uff, notepad wins this one on vim. Fast startup times? I use gomuks, that takes a minute for the initial sync. No mouse? Moving around in TUI text editors with hjkl is slow. I either jump where I want to go with…

Blender? There you have to use a mouse because you have a much much bigger state space to control.

Also, Intellij is perhaps a better example. You can fully control it via only the keyboard, yet no amount of plugins would turn (neo)vim into something as capable as it is. And it makes good use of the extra pixels - human can take in much more information than a text grid.

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

#122

Post by carra »

d-us-vb wrote: post #70
carra wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read that article long time ago, and for me it's a hard disagree. A system as complex and quirky as Unicode can never be considered "plain", and even today it is common for many apps that something Unicode-related breaks. ASCII is still the only text system that will really work well everywhere, which I consider a must for calling something plain text. And yes, ASCII means mostly limiting things to English but for…

I feel like that isn’t exactly a very useful definition of plaintext. If you mean “ASCII” say ASCII. Plain text is text intended to be interpreted as bytes that map simply to characters. Complexity is irrelevant.

Unfortunately no, Unicode is not simply a mapping of bytes to characters. It is a mapping of numbers to code points, and in some cases you can even get the same characters with multiple code point sequences (not a very good mapping!). Then you need to convert numbers to bytes, so aside from Unicode you also need an encoding. And there are multiple choices. So what would be "plain text" then? UTF-16? UTF-8? If so, with or without BOM? It can't be all of them. For something to really be "plain text" it has to be the same thing to everyone...

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

#123

Post by gf000 »

cfiggers wrote: post #52
gf000 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why? You easily have 4k pixels, why use a tiny subset of those in a very inefficient way? We have proper hardware to make a bunch of these computations actually fast, and yet we should stuck with drawing relatively expensive text everywhere? If you only care about the UX of TUIs, that I can stand behind (though mostly as a guideline, it doesn't fit every workflow), but you can do that with a proper GUI just as we…

> 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…

> Constraint breeds consistency and consistency breeds coherence.

In principle I would agree, but there are plenty of bad citizens among TUIs, it's absolutely not true that you can just start using one.

The same way there are excellent GUI applications like blender or intellij.

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

#124

Post by zzo38computer »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #35
mort96 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UTF-8 does not encode "European glyphs" in two bytes, no. Most European languages use variations of the latin alphabet, meaning most glyphs in European languages use the 1-byte ASCII subset of UTF-8. The occasional non-ASCII glyph becomes two bytes, that's correct, but that's a much smaller bloat than what you imply. Anyway, what are you comparing it to, what is your preferred alternative? Do you prefer using code pa…

> Do you prefer using code pages so that the bytes in a file have no meaning unless you also supply code page information? Yes. Note that this is already how Unicode is supposed to work. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_order_mark . A file isn't meaningful unless you know how to interpret it; that will always be true. Assuming that all files must be in a preexisting format defeats the purpose of having fil…

> A file isn't meaningful unless you know how to interpret it; that will always be true.

There are multiple levels of meaning, though; character encoding is just one part of it. For example, a text file might be plain text, or HTML, or JSON, or a C source code, etc; a binary file might be DER, or IFF, or ZIP, etc; and then there will be e.g. what kind of data a JSON or DER or IFF contains and how that level of the data is interpreted, etc.

> Cyrillic and Greek characters get two bytes, even when they are by definition identical to ASCII characters.

Whether or not they are identical to ASCII characters depends on the character set and on other things, such as what they are being used for; the definition of "identical" is not so simple as you make it seem. Unicode defines them as not identical, which is appropriate for some uses but is wrong for other uses. (Unicode also defines some characters as identical even though in some uses it would be more appropriate to treat them as not identical, too. So, Unicode is both ways bad.)

> This bloat is actually worse than the bloat you get by using UTF-8 for Japanese; Cyrillic and Greek will easily fit into one byte.

I agree with that (although I think UTF-8 should not be used for Japanese either), but it isn't because of which characters are considered "identical" or not. There are problems with Unicode in general regardless of which encoding you use.

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

#125

Post by zie »

Telemakhos wrote: post #89
safety1st wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We had "opinionated" TUIs with emacs, and Omarchy will never surpass emacs' ease, shallow learning curve, and configurability. Emacs is the operating system of the future, and you can already integrate AI with it. It provides everything you need or want or don't know you want except a decent text editor.

> It provides everything you need or want or don't know you want except a decent text editor.

That's what evil is for :P

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

#127

Post by ambicapter »

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…

Oh, the irony, I go to the website and the only thing it shows is a video to watch.

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

#128

Post by gf000 »

tolciho wrote: post #103
Someone wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Come on, my previous phone had more bandwidth via a goddamn satellite, sending emergency infos.

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

#129

Post by pwinnski »

gf000 wrote: post #117
pwinnski wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could double or quadruple the number of pixels, and it wouldn't make any difference in how much information humans comprehend easily. You would be using more computing power and more memory to deliver the same amount of useful information less efficiently. A "proper GUI" is rarely better than a well-designed TUI for communicating textual information, IMO. And the TUI constraints keep the failure-states for badly-…

What about a map, or an image? We can surely agree that humans can take in a lot more information than a readable letter-grid allows, depending on the type of information.

Sure, of course sometimes an image conveys things better than a thousand words. But a very large percentage of what most people do with computers is primarily text, with more images in ads than useful content. By and large GUIs don't use images to convey information better, they just make text worse.

Modern terminal software supports displaying images, for what it's worth.

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

#130

Post by sixtyj »

SoftTalker wrote: post #79
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…

I always liked Borland's code editor (would you call it an IDE?) from that era. The one that you used in Turbo-C, Turbo-Pascal, etc. Text-mode versions of Wordperfect, Wordstar, and Lotus 1-2-3 were pretty good too.

Well, everything text-based is somehow calming, no need to touch mouse (and have a carpal tunnel).
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