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Write plain text files

sive.rs

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Re: Write plain text files

#411

Post by jibalt »

cpressland wrote: post #224
usrbinbash wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that there's no such thing as "plain text" Please show me a computing device that cannot deal with ASCII. And UTF-8 has, by now, reached a level of ubiquity that encompasses almost everything in IT as well.

The Commodore 64 I’m building could probably be taught how to read ASCII with enough effort, but out of the box it can’t. I appreciate modern computers conform to standards, but that doesn’t mean that these standards have always existed, or will always exist.

ASCII text is just byte data ... nothing has to be done to "teach" a Commodore 64 to read ASCII. Displaying it on the screen is slightly problematic because the Commodore 64 uses PETSCII, which is an older version of ASCII, so some characters will be displayed differently, but it's not a terribly big deal.

> that doesn’t mean that these standards have always existed, or will always exist

These are irrelevant "points". ASCII will still be in use when human civilization ends soon (possibly next week due to nuclear war, or else in a few hundred years due to global warming).

Re: Write plain text files

#412

Post by jibalt »

usrbinbash wrote: post #241
cpressland wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Commodore 64 I’m building could probably be taught how to read ASCII with enough effort, but out of the box it can’t. I appreciate modern computers conform to standards, but that doesn’t mean that these standards have always existed, or will always exist.

> but out of the box it can’t. Even if such a device needs to be used, decoding ascii is a trivial lookup operation, not remotely comparable to decoding some arcane binary format, or a convoluted XML-derived format such as they are used in WYSIWYG editor formats. Yes, text relies on an encoding standard. So do numbers btw. (big/little endian, 2s/1s complement, sign/magnitude, floating-point representations), element…

A Commodore 64 can certainly read ASCII out of the box since ASCII is just data ... I'm not sure that person purportedly building a Commodore 64 understands how computers work. And the Commodore 64 display hardware expects PETSCII, which is based on ASCII-1963 ... a few characters will be displayed incorrectly, but alphanumerics will be fine.

Re: Write plain text files

#413

Post by jibalt »

severak_cz wrote: post #233
Singletoned wrote: post #212

I hate to be pedantic[1], but: > HTML, Markdown, JSON, LaTeX, and many other standard formats, are just plain text. On this definition, Word and Excel are just (zipped) plain text files. > Every device, including ones long gone, and ones not invented yet, can read and edit plain text. This definitely isn't true, and it kind of misses the point that there's no such thing as "plain text". It's still encoded in ascii, o…

> On this definition, Word and Excel are just (zipped) plain text files. but this is true only for newer versions. In older versions it was binary salad derived from C's data model. And even in new versions these are far from files you can safely edit by hand.

doc and xls files have nothing to do with "C's data model".

Re: Write plain text files

#414

Post by martyalain »

My single tool is a homemade tiny wiki, lambdatank, usable from any web browser and storing pages as text files. Instead of Markdown I structure pages using a homemade language, lambdatalk, a dialect of lambda-calculus, inspired by Lisp, a single syntax built on HTML, CSS, JAVASCRIPT, DOM, ... With which I can boldify "Hello World" writing {b Hello World}, I can compute the diagonal of a square rectangle writing {sqrt {+ {* 3 3} {* 4 4}}}, create functions, draw graphics, play with the Mandelbrot set, as it can be seen here: http://lambdaway.free.fr So I totally agree with you, and my datas will be free forever. Alain Marty

Re: Write plain text files

#415

Post by chrisfinazzo »

tomrod wrote: post #404
thefunnyman wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do the same by having my resume in latex which I’ve checked in to git. Been meaning to write a GH action to generate the pdf artifact automatically.

I've decided to migrate my CV to Markdown instead -- pandoc can dump to LaTeX, PDF, you name it.

I eventually settled on LaTeX - although I considered dropping all the way down to groff/troff and having TeX be an intermediate step in the process.

Custom LaTeX classes made this more trouble than I was willing to deal with, so I decided to not pursue it further. I suspect Markdown might have similar challenges dealing with this, although given that the "verbose mode" is just HTML, I might be able to make it work.[1]

The print media type has been around for eons, but the @page rules don't support everything I need and are generally absent in WebKit browsers.

[1]: https://github.com/chrisfinazzo/resume

Re: Write plain text files

#418

Post by awill »

crossroadsguy wrote: post #403
awill wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but both of them store notes in a proprietary way, so if they shut down (or I just wanted to move), wouldn't it be harder to migrate off?

I use nvAlt for Simplenote on Mac where I chose to keep the file in text format in a Dropbox folder and it also sync to Simplenote server which easily makes the data available to mobile app. So Simplenote server does the sync between apps and since I keep the data in Dropbox folder the data is synced/backed up (I separately backup that folder as well) there as well. (To be honest that works better for me than FSNotes…

excellent. Thanks!

Re: Write plain text files

#419

Post by yencabulator »

Zak wrote: post #336
phreack wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once thought git for humans would be a great idea but never got around to speccing it out. Later on, a lawyer friend showed me the software they used 'for backup' (that they paid thousands per month for) and it turned out everything about it was just exactly like SVN. The terminology was different, the UX was laser focused to the intended users, but at the end of the day it was commits, syncs, merging, pretty much…

I had a similar thought some time ago and concluded it's an impossible task. The problem is that it would need to understand every file format its users care about and be able to represent changes in a useful way. How do you merge destructive edits to image files?

Many version control systems aimed more toward digital assets do some sort of locking, so only one user edits a file at a time. Advisory or mandatory, with support for breaking locks, etc.

Re: Write plain text files

#420

Post by FireInsight »

dmje wrote: post #162
awill wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just unfortunate that the proprietary apps have IMHO much nicer UI/UX. Why can't we have both! On Mac I use Ulysses. I get the benefits described here while still having a fast, native app with excellent UX. I have Mac for work, and Linux for personal and an Android phone. That means Ulysses on Mac, ThiefMD on Linux, and Markor on Android, all synced with syncthings. Native apps on different OSes is the best sol…

The look of Obsidian put me off too but after I got into it I realised the whole theme is totally css-able. It's really easy to make it your own. I do agree though, they do themselves no favours with that ugly black / purple website. They need a much better, much prettier default. All that aside, I'm delighted with my switch to Obsidian. Just an amazing tool, and total reassurance that it's just markdown with all the…

I've always liked Obsidians design or/and haven't thought of it as bad. We've all seen way worse looking applications.
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