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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

#61

Post by zahlman »

layer8 wrote: post #46
adityaathalye wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

XML, JSON, YAML, RDF, EDN, LaTeX, OrgMode, Markdown... Plenty of plaintext, but structured information formats that are "yes, and". Yes, I can process them as lines of plain text, and I can do structured data transformations on them too, and there are clients (or readers) that know how to render them in WYSIWYG style.

XML arguably isn’t plain text, but a binary format: If you add/change the encoding declaration on the first line, the remaining bytes will be interpreted differently. Unless you process it as a function of its declared (or auto-detected, see below) encoding, you have to treat it as a binary file. In the absence of an encoding declaration, the encoding is in some cases detected automatically based on the first four by…

[dead]

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

#63

Post by ButlerianJihad »

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…

vaxocentrism, or “All the World’s a VAX”

http://www.catb.org/esr/jargon/html/V/vaxocentrism.html

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

#64

Post by unleaded »

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…

What's behind this new obsession with TUIs/CLIs anyway? You always had people obsessed with i3 and vim etc but this is something different.

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

#65

Post by user3939382 »

zahlman wrote: post #58
user3939382 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope it’s inevitable. Most users’ computing workloads by far are text oriented. The terminal is capable of flexbox now. Current GUIs create massive complexity and power draw relative to their value. Over a long enough arc, economic inefficiency is doomed.

> The terminal is capable of flexbox now. You mean like https://silvery.dev/examples/layout.html ? This is definitely not a UI development paradigm I would have expected to see.

That’s the tip of a conceivable iceberg but exactly. Also look at kitty graphics protocol.

Look at the amount of engineering resources we pour into OS GUI toolkits and then browsers. Those layers of complexity aren’t there because we stood back and said, “given what we know in 2026 how should we design a GUI compositor?”. The majority of the stack is written how it is by archeological happenstance. One generation adds on top of the prior since the 60s.

I’d say start from the terminal, fix the rendering limitations that drove the split from terminal and then to the browser. If we pin down efficient GUI, we could have machines that cover non graphics workloads which is the vast majority with solar and the equivalent of a 6502.

The amount of energy wasted on modern stacks relative to the tasks being delivered is incalculable.

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

#66

Post by clickety_clack »

unleaded wrote: post #64
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…

What's behind this new obsession with TUIs/CLIs anyway? You always had people obsessed with i3 and vim etc but this is something different.

It’s functionally focused and because most apps are web based now, and TUIs are generally local, it makes them seem relatively very fast.

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

#67

Post by [deleted] »

hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #22
Joel11 wrote: post #20

It's good to see the plain text, it's been a while that people wanting them. So many users wants the Special fonts but in here simple is Special to eyes and Mind. As a developer I agree. Sometimes simplicity is more Special and powerful than complex formats.

* L a u g h s i n u t f 1 6 *

[deleted]

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

#68

Post by bmitc »

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…

The point is, a lot of work went into making that happen. I.e., plain text as it is today is not some inherent property of computing. It is a binary protocol and displaying text through fonts is also not a trivial matter.

So my question is: what are we leaving on the table by over focusing on text? What about graphs and visual elements?

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

#69

Post by LeCompteSftware »

unleaded wrote: post #64
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…

What's behind this new obsession with TUIs/CLIs anyway? You always had people obsessed with i3 and vim etc but this is something different.

I think part of it is Visual Studio Code doing most IDE things very well, creating a market niche for terminal tooling that handles the rest.

Certainly part of it is also people of my generation being nostalgic for the TUIs of DOS file managers and editors.

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

#70

Post by d-us-vb »

carra wrote: post #40
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 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.

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