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Write plain text files

sive.rs

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Re: Write plain text files

#381

Post by awill »

merdaverse wrote: post #372
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…

Obsidian looks interesting, but how do you sync between devices? Their sync service seems really expensive. On desktop I guess you can use git/Dropbox plugin, but what about mobile? I take a lot of notes on my Android phone.

I currently sync with FolderSync on Android. That syncs a Google Drive or Dropbox folder to your phone. Then use that folder with Obsidian

Re: Write plain text files

#382

Post by catach »

zouhair wrote: post #352
D13Fd wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly I think modern Sharepoint/OneDrive based .docx files have already leapfrogged git for the average user. In an office environment, modern MS Word gives you a really nice version history, with automatic or manual/named versions, plus multi-user simultaneous editing, with a slick and fast UI. It’s even cross platform - I send a coworker a link to a document, and they can open it and work on Word for Windows whi…

It's a proprietary format, it's not gonna last. Microsoft word can't even open files from old version of the same software. None of these word document will be readable in 50 years from now, a text file though.

A modern MS Word document is pretty much zipped XML and mostly ISO standard-compliant.

Re: Write plain text files

#383

Post by CRConrad »

justsomehnguy wrote: post #38

> I’ve brought my text files with me since 1990, from Mac to Windows to Linux to BSD > But plain text? Always. Everywhere. Quite obviously you have your files in ASCII. Anyone who needs more than 26 letters (or god forbid non-latin ones) are fucked. Sometimes quite literally. > Your writing should outlive you. Depending on companies is not an option. ASCII? Sure. EBCDIC? Ughh. UTF... 8? 16? 32? > If you rely on Word,…

> ASCII? Sure. EBCDIC? Ughh. UTF... 8? 16? 32?

8.

> Date: 2022.02.03

> Is this March 3rd or February 3rd?

February 3rd, obviously.

But the periods are weird; the standard is hyphens.

> Sure, but what about dates and encoding?

ISO and UTF-8.

Re: Write plain text files

#385

Post by CRConrad »

andrewclunn wrote: post #9

Is 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?

Even if your editor "supports" other encodings than ASCII -- i e. it can save text in other formats -- many (most?) of them can be set to save in some particular encoding by default (so set it to save as ASCII), and usually they save previously-existing files in the same encoding the files already had.

And, as someone already mentioned, all the first 127 characters of the UTF-8 encoding are the same as the ASCII ones, so a UTF-8-encoded file containing only those characters is identical to -- is -- an ASCII-encoded file.

Re: Write plain text files

#386

Post by chrisweekly »

ubermonkey wrote: post #327
chrisweekly wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Markdown isn't an alternative." Strongest possible respectful disagreement. --- ^ orig comment above, edits below (I was interrupted when 1st commenting; apologies to anyone who responded to the short version) --- See eg Obsidian ( https://obsidian.md ) for a great example. It's astonishing how feature-rich it's become. WYSIWYG editor, Excalidraw integration, Slid.es, etc etc etc. And if you have any webdev chops at…

Asking people to become web devs to get the kind of formatting Word makes trivial is not a winning argument.

Agreed. It's also not the argument I was making.

Re: Write plain text files

#387

Post by rmbyrro »

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.

I thought Google Doc had solved this with single-version model and automatic change history with easy restoration.

Re: Write plain text files

#388

Post by anta40 »

pokstad wrote: post #160
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.

NB does exactly this: https://github.com/xwmx/nb

Interesting, as much as I admire Evernote, I want something that is open source and can be installed locally. Of course, Git integration is another plus point.

Re: Write plain text files

#389

Post by nextlevelwizard »

sdoering wrote: post #368
nextlevelwizard wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes the article extremely silly, actually almost pointless. If you don't see difference between plain text files and text files then that's pretty much it for this conversation. EDIT: just to hammer this point home; if you gave me a task to write a report in plain text and I delivered a .txt file with some custom markup language, would you consider the task to be completed satisfactorily? I wouldn't. You can a…

Why not. If there is a tool like pandoc parsing and translating your text and markup to anything (html, pdf, word docx, etc). Why not. I did that quite often at a former job. All version controlled in git. A few markup headers. Text formatted in markdown. Later combined with a bit of templating logic to ensure different looks (one for client and one for agency) when translating it into the final designed report. Actu…

You can also version control Word files. That’s not an argument. Apparently plain text is anything and everything. What makes docx file not plain text? You can still edit and view it with your text editor it is just harder.

Re: Write plain text files

#390

Post by nextlevelwizard »

sdoering wrote: post #367
nextlevelwizard wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then the whole article loses all of its meaning. If you find yourself writing Python in Word something has gone so horribly wrong there is no saving you. Just use the good old file program and you'll see that in any coherent world we classify python, php, html, and js files as different from actual plain text files. This very much feels like you are trying to argue tea is same as plain water.

Interesting interpretation of my words. Or should I say projection? Nothing to do with what I said. But if it pleases you. I am fine being an incoherent and unsavable something. As said. There is no technical difference between a txt or a php file. I can both run through cat and grep stuff. Are there special programs that interpret the contents differently? Sure. The same with the difference between a php and a py fi…

So program written in brainfuck is plain text?

You can also cat and grep binary files I guess everything is plain text

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