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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

#161

Post by aejm »

epistasis wrote: post #139
aejm wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thank you for taking the time to reply! Agreed, it does seem like any auditor would be able to verify all this information from other sources, but I really like the idea of having multiple independent levels of attestation for my organizations important financial and legal documents.

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

#162

Post by SoftTalker »

sixtyj wrote: post #138
reaperducer wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 k…

Mainframe terminals seemed to have the keyboards at a very high angle. Maybe that was to simulate the key height differences on mechanical typewriter, but for a computer keyboard I prefer them to be as flat as possible. I have not had any problem with CT since using flat keyboards.

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

#163

Post by jasomill »

lelanthran wrote: post #25
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)

I can't tell what the argument is just from the slideshow. The main point appears to be that code pages, UTF-16, etc are all "plain text" but not really. If that really was the argument, then it is, in 2026, obsolete; utf-8 is everywhere.

Tell that to programmers writing code to extract data from PCL print streams by stripping escape sequences and processing the result as "plain text" (in multiple incompatible extended ASCII encodings specified by the stripped escape sequences), or anyone exporting data from Excel in "CSV (Comma delimited) (*.csv)" format.

UTF-8 is everywhere. Until it's not. And it's impossible to distinguish UTF-8 from any other extended ASCII encoding given a sample containing only ASCII characters, so there's still no reliable way to process data that can only be described as "plain text".

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

#164

Post by jasomill »

zzo38computer wrote: post #114
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 agree with you that Unicode is too complicated and messy, although it also shows that whether or not something is considered "plain" is itself too difficult. Unicode has caused many problems (although it was common for m17n and i18n to be not working well before Unicode either). One problem is making some programs no longer 8-bit clean. Unicode might be considered in two ways: (1) Unicode is an approximation of mul…

All character setes do not encode subsets of Unicode.

Two well-known counterexamples that come immediately to mind:

1. Mac OS Roman includes a non-Unicode Apple logo.

2. The Atari ST character set includes two non-Unicode characters that combine to create an Atari logo, and 4 non-Unicode characters that combine to create a picture of J.R. "Bob" Dobbs [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._R._%22Bob%22_Dobbs

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

#165

Post by jasomill »

tolciho wrote: post #111
everybodyknows wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://github.com/TheoKVA/ascii-box-editor A visual editor of UTF-8 BOX DRAWING characters, contrary to "ascii" in the name. No server, no installation: browser-side Javascript only.

"ascii" for some means "anything textlike", so for example you may see roguelike game developers saying "nice ascii" in response to a screenshot full of CP437, Unicode, or text-like glyphs, all very much not ASCII. Some will get defensive when called out on this, claiming that CP437 is okay to call ascii because it's "extended ASCII" (nevermind the many different and conflicting extensions), or others point out that…

And in Win32, the term "ANSI" is used variously to refer to the current default non-UTF-16 character encoding, any non-UTF-16 character encoding, any non-MS-DOS, non-UTF-16 character encoding, and probably other things I've forgotten.

Ironically, one of the few things you can reliably say about any "ANSI" encoding in Windows is that it was never standardized by ANSI.

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

#167

Post by zzo38computer »

jasomill wrote: post #164
zzo38computer wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you that Unicode is too complicated and messy, although it also shows that whether or not something is considered "plain" is itself too difficult. Unicode has caused many problems (although it was common for m17n and i18n to be not working well before Unicode either). One problem is making some programs no longer 8-bit clean. Unicode might be considered in two ways: (1) Unicode is an approximation of mul…

All character setes do not encode subsets of Unicode. Two well-known counterexamples that come immediately to mind: 1. Mac OS Roman includes a non-Unicode Apple logo. 2. The Atari ST character set includes two non-Unicode characters that combine to create an Atari logo, and 4 non-Unicode characters that combine to create a picture of J.R. "Bob" Dobbs [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._R._%22Bob%22_Dobbs

Yes, I know that (I was aware of both of these cases, as well as others). In those cases, there are characters that do not correspond to any Unicode characters.

Nevertheless, what I was saying is that many programs seem to be designed as though other character sets do encode subsets of Unicode, but actually they are different character sets and are not Unicode.

However, what I meant was, in addition to things like the examples that you have, other less obvious cases. Even if characters do correspond to Unicode (and sometimes there is more than one way to do it, which is the case for several PC characters), they are not necessarily supposed to work in the same way.

At best, Unicode could be used as an approximation if the other character sets cannot be used, although sometimes there are other ways to do it.

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

#168

Post by arter45 »

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 can but it’s not part of a plaintext standard. You could certainly build a text editor which can decode a base64 string, but to transform that into a picture you need something implementing the GIF (or JPEG or PNG) specification, otherwise it’s just a binary blob.

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

#170

Post by safety1st »

dwedge wrote: post #77
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…

Apart from being wayland and a more modern look, why are you excited about omarchy and AI and you weren't with i3?

How did you know that I use i3 on all my non-Omarchy machines? :D
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