Somebody needs to watch "Plain Text" (Dylan Beattie, NDC Copenhagen 2022) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gd5uJ7Nlvvo
For example, have fun with ISO 8859-2 vs. Windows 1250. And add Windows 1252 for giggles. And for the ASCII-only persons: there still is EBCDIC.
Take at look at the "reality": there are converters for almost any file format and file format descriptions for (almost any imaginable), so there is a chance to read or write almost any format by yourself (yes, some can be really complex, as for example some 3D formats like 3DS or LWO).
I don't mean to say that somebody shouldn't use "plain text" for themselves, but that the idea of "this is plain text, this works everywhere and anytime" is not true.
And the list of known codepages (and I can guarantee you there is some hardware - a printer - out there that uses it's own, because it had been only ever used with it's own printer driver/program/...): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page
Full Unicode support is very hard. The best I've seen is in Raku. You can leave without it completely e.g. Zig.
No, there is more than one valid definition, the one you have used is the one used e.g. by the Unicode standard (but their definition is narrowed to Unicode, so anything not Unicode isn't plain text). But it doesn't matter which definition of "text" somebody uses, encoding is always a problem if not explicitly set like it is possible when using XML and HTML.
> "pain text"
Love that typo :D
I welcome you to the world of printers, specially industrial label printers when using their (fast) bitmap fonts instead of e.g. true type ones.
My problem is that while vim, markdown to HTML, and headless browser printing to PDF all work great on my desktop Linux machine there isn’t really a way to translate this to iOS and back.
If I could (a) mount my iCloud Drive in my Linux machine and (b) have a markdown centric editor on my phone then it would all work nicely. Unfortunately I feel like the lure of commercial success means Apple won’t allow the former and anyone working on the latter is doing it as a closed, proprietary, commercial system.
I curse myself every day for mixing operating systems!
Would be nice if there was a "this is a plain text folder" option (but I appreciate you'd get a million customer support queries asking where the formatting has gone when people activate it accidentally.)
But that's exactly the point of the article. It doesn't matter which app you use, or whether that specific app goes out of business or enshittifies - text files are portable to any other app. Sync it with rsync or git, they're just text.
That's why so many people on this site love Obsidian despite it being closed-source - the files it uses all exist in the most open file format of all.
I also saw this point being made elsewhere recently regarding how iPadOS still does not have TextEdit: https://www.macstories.net/stories/not-an-ipad-pro-review/#m...
Do iOS and Android ship the tools to open/edit/save plain text files these days?
Edit: My question is not about third party apps. It is about what ships with iOS and plain Android.
To your point about editing in the phone, Obsidian has great iOS and iPadOS versions that work as well as the desktop version (albeit with some wackiness with some extensions that only work on the desktop version).
In combination, this gives me a seamless setup that is all text files (.md) and that works really well across all three form factors.
As an aside, iAWriter is very good. I use that paired with Syncthing for cross-platform working.
As neighbor poster mentioned, you can use eg Syncthing to sync your plain text files.
Yes and no. Non-plaintext formats can choose to integrate CRDTs or Operational Transform or such to improve sync.
(And, the other way around, plaintext formats are more suitable for long-term history in version control.)
And also because they are not sandboxed.
Statements like that clearly shows the author means ASCII is the default everywhere.
Notebooks without lines are the plain text files of the analogue world.
No lines to dictate how and what you want to write or draw.
That's a good analogy for other reasons. Only people who can read your handwriting and know what language it should be in have a change of being able to read your "plain text". For example, have fun reading handwritten German in Kurrent (or Sütterlin): https://kurent.bastan.cz/ - and these are really, really legible fonts.
Having everything as CSV, markdown, GPX etc means that I can use all the excellent software in the world to manipulate data... Or just a text editor. It's a lot easier than writing my own software to manipulate my own database.
It also means that my data will outlive my software without any effort.
And it means that backups are handled by my existing backup software.
I also moved my website to a static site generator earlier. Same reasons. I edit that website for a living, and using Sublime Text instead of a CMS WYSIWYG editor sped up my work dramatically. I can't overstate how much better it made batch edits.
You can jot down ideas every day in markdown somewhere, maybe in a daily journal that's part of your second brain. Then you can move them into documents in a Git repo. Then you can feed them into an LLM and start producing interesting functions for your personal utility library. Then you can string them into a software solution for one problem or another.
This probably sounds vaguely disturbing if you are wearing a software engineer's hat. But if you're wearing a hacker's hat it's nirvana. At no point do you have to worry about being bound by the limitations of a particular tool, you are just transforming one chunk of text into another and moving those chunks around, really.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30521545 [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36591494
But if I'm doing a Real Project, Markdown files in a git repo are perfect.
Luckily it's very easy to just copy from Keep to plan text.
The issue it's that they are desktop-bound, no matter what you do. You can also run Emacs on Android but such platforms are meant just to consume content and munge data from users, not to produce, so it's not a matter of UI or mere bits availability. For sharing there are a bit of limitations but that's still easy if needed.
Beside that the most IT-frustration is the current state of development done to suck out all power to the user: we have IPv6 since decades, oh yes it's not perfect, but we perfectly can have a global per device and we can buy personal domain names and have subdomains on them. Unfortunately even if NOT having that is hyper-costly and challenging (
NAT just to say) that's not there. FLOSS available to uncomfortable self-host is damn limited, we miss things like:- damn simple desktop screen sharing NO THIRD PARTY, no need for special configs, not need to circumvent NAT and so on
- damn simple VoIP with or without video, P2P or with a personal server, but one, not to be configured with a gazzilion of things (yes we have GNU SIPWitch, Mumble, but still they are not a thing you deploy in a snap)
- damn simple internet-wide file sharing (we have gazillion of options, none simple and effective)
From a technological standpoint, those are perfectly possible, not done because "we need to been able to surveil users", "nobody is interested" (blatantly false, seen the popularity of crappy surveilling proprietary services we all know) and so on.
Long story short: yes we can do some thing to use computers effectively, taking notes is a good example, but we potentially can do MUCH MUCH MUCH more and we could not because of some "interests". That's a real shame simply because we lose decades of evolution and we only have one life, no respawn in the IRL game.
