Plain text has been around for decades and it’s here to stay • Hacker News Board

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

#131

Post by zzo38computer » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 8:02 PM UTC

carra wrote: post #122

d-us-vb wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, wit…

> 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!).

It is worse than that; you can also get different characters with the same code points, and also same code points and characters that should be different according to some uses, and also different code points and characters that should be same according to some uses, etc.

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

#132

Post by wongarsu » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 8:03 PM UTC

rmunn wrote: post #15

ssivark wrote: post #5

Couldn't help riffing off on a tangent from the title (since the article is about diagramming tools)... Dylan Beattie has a thought-provoking presentation for anyone who believes that "plain text" is a simple / solid substrate for computing: "There's no such thing as plain text" https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/theres-no-such-thing-as... (you'll find many videos from different conferences)

Haven't watched the videos yet, but from the slides, it looks like part of the issue he was talking about was encodings (there's a slide illustrating UTF-16LE ve UTF-16BE, for example). Thankfully, with UTF-8 becoming the default everywhere (so that you need a really good reason not to use it for any given document), we're back at "yes, there is such a thing as plain text" again. It has a much larger set of valid cha…

Until you hit a CSV exported by Excel

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

#133

Post by aejm » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 8:04 PM UTC

epistasis wrote: post #100

It's fun to see a plaintext accounting view as the example... I just switched from QuickBooks to Beancount+Fava for my sole proprietorship, and couldn't be happier. I've added a text-based simple invoice system, a text-based vehicle mileage tracker, and have validators that ensure that every expense with a tax status has a document attached to it. It's far easier and faster to use than QuickBooks, I don't have to put…

This is really good inspiration for some of my plain text accounting projects! Could you please go into more detail about your RFC3161 attestation of commits? I'm assuming you're signing your commits with a gpg key to assert that it was in fact you who made the commit. Do you use an external timstamping service and an external ca authority, or do you build your own chains of trust? If you were asked to attest your accounting commits, what would that look like to the auditor?

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

#134

Post by reaperducer » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 8:06 PM UTC

sixtyj wrote: post #130

SoftTalker wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

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

Carpal tunnel syndrome isn't exclusive to using a mouse. I dated a woman who had a severe case of it from using a mainframe terminal with no mouse.

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

#135

Post by imoverclocked » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 8:13 PM UTC

Does the community here consider HN as plaintext?

Obviously, the site is html with hyperlinks etc ... but it's basically implementing a text interface that I can click on.

In a cryptographic sense, html itself is plaintext since it is encoded as ascii/utf-8. However, the MIME type of text/plain is distinct from text/html to describe the html encoding of document style/structure information.

A terminal is often considered plaintext but in reality there are escape sequences to encode meta-information which is otherwise unreadable to most humans.

On the other end of the spectrum, there are images with a few words transcribed on a lot of social media platforms. To blur this line, recent(ish) mobile platforms recognize text embedded in images and make it selectable. Given this context, is text in an image without anything else considered plaintext?

I guess my real question is, "where do we draw the line" for what we call plaintext, decades after the initial implementation.

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

#136

Post by gf000 » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 8:52 PM UTC

pwinnski wrote: post #129

gf000 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

In a worse, and dramatically overcomplicated way. Like it's kind of funny that largely the same people that is all for this supposed ultra minimalism would be celebrating a Rube Goldberg way of doing graphical interfaces? (Because in the end it is a graphical interface).

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

#137

Post by jjice » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 9:14 PM UTC

epistasis wrote: post #100

It's fun to see a plaintext accounting view as the example... I just switched from QuickBooks to Beancount+Fava for my sole proprietorship, and couldn't be happier. I've added a text-based simple invoice system, a text-based vehicle mileage tracker, and have validators that ensure that every expense with a tax status has a document attached to it. It's far easier and faster to use than QuickBooks, I don't have to put…

I love this kind of thing so much. One thing I try to keep in mind when doing my own simple file formats is knowing what I would have to do to convert it to a more common format, if I need to for any reason. Knowing I have an "escape plan" if I need to get them to a different format for someone makes me feel good about it.

In your case, I bet you could easily convert it to a CSV that your accountant could tolerate.

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

#138

Post by sixtyj » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 9:15 PM UTC

reaperducer wrote: post #134

sixtyj wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Well, everything text-based is somehow calming, no need to touch mouse (and have a carpal tunnel). Carpal tunnel syndrome isn't exclusive to using a mouse. I dated a woman who had a severe case of it from using a mainframe terminal with no mouse.

Mainframe terminals were nasty, I remember them. Similar high keys to recent keyboards that are so liked by gamers… but I get it. My dentist had a carpal tunnel that needed surgical procedure.

If I don’t use mouse all day my hands are pretty much all right.

Good mouse and keyboard is a key to productivity.

Everytime I see someone using touchpad I don't get it. My fingers would be on fire in 10 minutes. People don't know what they're getting themselves into.

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

#139

Post by epistasis » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 9:40 PM UTC

aejm wrote: post #133

epistasis wrote: post #100

It's fun to see a plaintext accounting view as the example... I just switched from QuickBooks to Beancount+Fava for my sole proprietorship, and couldn't be happier. I've added a text-based simple invoice system, a text-based vehicle mileage tracker, and have validators that ensure that every expense with a tax status has a document attached to it. It's far easier and faster to use than QuickBooks, I don't have to put…

This is really good inspiration for some of my plain text accounting projects! Could you please go into more detail about your RFC3161 attestation of commits? I'm assuming you're signing your commits with a gpg key to assert that it was in fact you who made the commit. Do you use an external timstamping service and an external ca authority, or do you build your own chains of trust? If you were asked to attest your ac…

The time stamp stuff is mostly a lark, because the bank statements and receipts are probably all that really matters, but it was fun!

I use freetsa.org and OpenSSL on the git commit hash to tie that commit to a particular point in time. I also added the Bitcoin based opentimestamps-client time stamping, but even fewer auditors would believe that it's of any value... Edit: I only timestamp after account reconciliation right now, and will do it when I close the books for a year. The files for attestation get attached to the commit with a git note, and get added to a directory for easier browsing. An LLM can write scripts for this, probably from just copying and pasting this comment as direction. I installed them as git subcommands.

Other CAs offer for-fee time stamp attestation, and I hear it may hold value in the EU, but here in the US it's only for fun, and for very small values of fun!

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

#140

Post by epistasis » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 11:14 PM UTC

jjice wrote: post #137

epistasis wrote: post #100

It's fun to see a plaintext accounting view as the example... I just switched from QuickBooks to Beancount+Fava for my sole proprietorship, and couldn't be happier. I've added a text-based simple invoice system, a text-based vehicle mileage tracker, and have validators that ensure that every expense with a tax status has a document attached to it. It's far easier and faster to use than QuickBooks, I don't have to put…

I love this kind of thing so much. One thing I try to keep in mind when doing my own simple file formats is knowing what I would have to do to convert it to a more common format, if I need to for any reason. Knowing I have an "escape plan" if I need to get them to a different format for someone makes me feel good about it. In your case, I bet you could easily convert it to a CSV that your accountant could tolerate.

That escape plan was my entire motivation. When I first started using QuickBooks I did a data export and it seemed like maybe it had everything. After a year with a disastrous UI change, spammy ads everywhere throughout the UI and by email for a product a pay a ton of money, I started to investigate alternatives and realized that QuickBooks export missed most of the work I had been putting into my books (receipts, invoices, and reconciliation). And once I knew that I couldn't use it as a primary data store anymore.

Now that I control my data, all forms of transformation are almost trivial, as you say!