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Write plain text files

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739 pointssivers412 comments

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 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 everything but branches, just laid out with domain specific language instead, professional office UI and simple UX.

So, uh, yeah I agree absolutely with you.

What was the tool called? We're currently looking to solve a problem for a client to better manage contract negotiation between his lawyers and the purchaser's lawyer (apartment units). ATM it's all done via email but I imagine there'd be heaps of tools out there.

I tried to git my resume once upon a time. It's still something I'd love to finish doing, it just makes sense to have a git repository as a timeline of your life:

https://github.com/ben174/bugben

Enterprise Content Management like EMC Documentum has this sort of thing baked in (it's been a long time, but they're definitely on top of it). But that's for big companies.

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?

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 while I edit the same doc on Word for Mac or even on the web-based Word.

It’s shockingly good.

After not using Word for years we've been using it for a few months now for a project, expecting it would be decent.

While some of the ideas are great, the overall experience was pretty bad. Leaving autosave on often slowed down Word to an unworkable pace and after a few other issues (I'm not exactly sure what, wasn't involved) we just made sure only one person at a time works on the document.

Some other annoying small issues I experienced: when working together sometimes your undo history is gone. I guess that's because someone else edited too and correctly undoing something someone else edited in between is not simple. IMO it's impossible and any system doing merges automatically will fall apart at some point.

Track edits cannot track deleting rows of a table

Wed based word works actually pretty fine, but it misses random features. Adding captions seems not to be supported.

It's great, until it isnt. For small and simple documents (sub 20 pages), there's no better option.

In my experience it starts to creak on large documents with multiple editors. I did a project many years ago where the key deliverable was a large report, worked upon by 3-4 contributors over 12 weeks.

That last week was absolute madness. Document got corrupted, and we tried all sorts of things. We ended up importing the corrupt document into Google Docs, which, oddly enough, did a better job of working with a corrupt Word document than MS Word did.

Word also includes a nice GUI diffing tool for docx files. It's possible to make git diff use it using something like https://github.com/ForNeVeR/ExtDiff

I dont use word, but I do know people that do use it (the modern version) and they still have files called "...final 3 copy(4) really final.docx".

These features are nice and all, but the thing is, most users not only don't care about using them, but don't care about even the idea of them to know they exist, so they continue with the old workflow.

Most of the time its better to get out of the users way, but in cases like this, if you truly do want to get rid of the infinite finals, they need a bit of a nudge

We use SharePoint for revisions for casual documents and another CM system for tracking releases of official documents. The CM system is meant really for CAD models but it lets you upload Word docs that it displays as PDFs with watermarked revision information so you have to have a revision table at the front of the document for listing changes. The SharePoint system is a lot easier to use but you don't get the same sort of change approval system since anyone can edit. Instead we use multiple folders for WIP, waiting for QA approval, and final versions. We have to follow ISO 9001 but anything developmental or that is just derivate of documents in the CM system can live on much more casual systems like git, SVN, or SharePoint.

That's not plain text and not easily parse-able with mutli document search

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.

Hmm. Sometimes I step back and I look at the version history in modern Office documents and it does feel convenient. I like the CRDT editing a lot. It still feels too loose and prone to issues, but I recognize its value to the average person.

Most of what bothers me is trying to view, read-only a previous version. Usually I have several Word or Excel documents up on my screen, and it's easy to begin modifying a past version that then becomes the latest. It's not reflex to open a previous version and untoggle autosave. It bites me all the time.. In Office's pursuit to help people avoid losing data, I wind up overwriting what I need to preserve. A lot..

I have not seen manual version names in Word doc history. Maybe I'm sheltered :s

The idea is pleasing, but when you specifically look at Git, its UX is rather disappointing. I'm not even talking about the CLI (after a while you can get used to it). I'm talking about resolving conflicts. If I have a sequence of changes A -> B -> C, then I change A and rebase B on top of A resolving any conflicts, then rebasing C on top of B will most of the time mean that Git will most likely ask me to resolve the same conflicts all over again and more. The kind of conflicts is also staggering. Each time I look at the conflicts it generated, I cannot explain how it could come up with that craziness. And all the while it also merged some changes without signalling conflicts, but instead breaking something in significant ways, without notifying me in any way, i.e. silently breaking something potentially important.

From what I've read, Pijul should fix at least the problem of needing to resolve the same conflicts multiple times over and over again. However, I feel that version control focused on text breaks, because the merging algorithm doesn't know anything about the semantics of what's represented in text. So yes, I'd say that version control in more areas would be nice, but one based on binary formats understood by version control. One glimpse of that may be KeePassXC, which can merge password databases and has never done it wrong in my experience.

While I agree in that Git’s UX is abysmal for the beginner or casual user, no one should have to endure resolving the same conflicts over and over again.

In my opinion, the following configuration should have been the default with Git:

    git config --global rerere.enabled true
    git config --global rerere.autoUpdate true

The `enabled` part means: transparently record all resolutions in a database, and re-apply them whenever bumping into the same conflict with the same pair of files in the future.

The `autoUpdate` part means: every time you finish re-applying a recorded resolution, please `git add` the result automatically for me so I don’t have to look for a "conflict" that’s actually no longer there.

The git diff process and conflict process really goes off the rails at times, and I have never figured that out. Modify one line in a file, and add one new line two lines after that modification, and the git diff is two 40 line chunks with some common lines, a bunch of additions, and a bunch of deletions.

Really? One new added line, and one delete/add two lines above it.

it usually works fine, it really does, but when it messes up, it really messes up big time. As long as it doesn't create a conflict, you just shrug and move on, but when it does create a conflict, holy-moley!

The biggest UX sin of Git is that rebasing is featured so prominently. If you had just done a normal merge commit then Git could have realized the common history, done a three-way merge, and resolved the conflict automatically.

But no, people always seem to insist on that linear history is the only concern that matters, explicitly delete the history, and then wonder why Git is so annoying and easy to screw up.

Maybe Git should have locked rebase behind a feature flag of some kind. `git pull --rebase` should certainly never have been added.

> However, I feel that version control focused on text breaks,

Pijul doesn't, by the way, the diff algorithm is customisable. I wrote one industrial application of Pijul that uses spaces as breaks, and semantics-aware breaking is totally doable.

Have you tried git rere?

> “Git for everything“ would be a multi-billion dollar startup easily.

In addition to plaintext documents, I have found that a simple JSON diff is also a very effective way to demonstrate changes between 2 complex biz objects. Non-developers can cope with this as long as the differences are visually obvious (red=removed, green=new, etc) and the object graph is reasonably flat. Everything can be trivially serialized to a JSON document, so this scales super well in my experience. We use a port of Google's DiffMatchPatch to generate human-friendly HTML reports of object diffs in our latest administration tools.

Git is barely useable by technical people.

Git would be a byzantine disaster for 'everyone else'.

The graph and abstractions involved introduce enormous unnecessary complexity.

Now, 'historical changes for everyone' - yes.

But not Git. Git is very powerful, but ultimately a questionably valuable product in many cases overall. And we've now settled on it, so it's a bit difficult to displace.

I was actually surprised : last time I used Git Bash on Windows it did work quite well with .docx files.

Then I switched jobs to avoid touching .docx files ...

The best alternative I've found to generate .docx output is R markdown, which uses pandoc under the hood and let's you program the whole document the way LaTeX would.

Pre LaTeX (I am old...) I wrote a huge command definition document for an embedded telecom product in nroff/troff. The whole thing was text files, with all the common parameters documented once, and the whole thing was assembled using a Makefile. So a typical page would be the command name, a descriptive paragraph, an include list of the parameters it used, and an include list of the possible return errors. Very little writing for a new command that mostly used existing parameters and errors.

And all tracked under CVS with a management/tracking layer on top.

# make command_doc

and the pile of text became a lovely 250 page postcript ready for the laser printer.

> The best alternative I've found to generate .docx output is R markdown

I do the same with markdown in Zettlr, which has a nice inline-preview format and can be used by my non-tech partners.

The generated .docx has a limited range of styles, but we see that as an advantage.

Powershell can generate and manipulate word docs, as another alternative to keeping content in a markdown file.

Isnt docx binary ? So git is storing a new version of the file every commit. That way too much storage space youre wasting.

Okay. Agree entirely.

I love some of the collaborative nature of Microsoft Teams and CRDT editing Word/Excel, but I'm usually pretty remote. Text over a tenuous WAN connection is ideal.

I work at a government agency and I was /just today/ getting them to review and approve Git and VS Code for our staff use - and pandoc. A couple years ago we never would have gotten open-source software approved. I wish I knew of an equivalent to SELinux or AppArmor for Windows so they could lock down things a semi-trusted application can do. VS Code will be used in a few different departments, but I mostly want it to help those unfamiliar with Git and its CLI (Git Graph is nice).

There's a trick out there to first convert things like Word documents to Markdown, and then do a diff of that intermediate output: https://hrishioa.github.io/tracking-word-documents-with-git/

Pandoc can only do so much. I'm trying to convince my part of the gov to put policy documents we disseminate to staff in a git repo, so we can track who did what and why (based on commit messages). This will be a big step, but thankfully one part of our org is already moving toward version control for IT and data analytics so I'm proposing this and suggesting we hop on their bandwagon. Momentum.

There's a Word template that we commonly use for legal purposes where it gives you line numbers and you write text to align with the numbers. When reviewing it's easy to say "change line 23 to read ....". This - for example - will not translate well through pandoc because the numbers and the text are separate text elements.

There's a market for making pandoc better. Visually translating how elements "flow" from 1 format to another, instead of simply transpiling XML to Markdown.

I'm still excited thinking in a year I might be able to git-blame the legal department for things. Or see a diff from 1 administration to the next.

>>> There's a market for making pandoc better.

Some thoughts:

1. Policy makers think they write policy in English (or other human language). But more and more it is the software.

2. "policy engines" aren't going to cut it - we need to introspect code to decide what the code does - and translate that back to policy.

3. at my work the best solution i have got is using unit tests to explain what the policy is based on test comments - and again that's using english and again it's terrible ("best")

I think the real solution is both wider software literacy so that discussion happen "in code" and code that is more like policy (composable functional languages are thus likely to be useful here)

But great to hear you are taking any steps at all - would an HN letter writing campaign to your ministers help?

I love pandoc and git and writing text files, but oh my, unless the users in your organization are tech savvy, your scenario sounds like a recipe for disaster.

At least for LaTeX there are packages like lineno that will add line numbers to the compiled document which can then be referenced with a label automatically similar to equation or figure captions. So if somebody tells you to change line 23 you can reply with "Please see line \lineref{whatever} for change." and it will automatically fill where that change is to "Please see line 25" or whatever in case it's been moved by other changes.

I have long thought writing law is a LOT like writing code. When you actually look at modern laws, they're basically legal patch files.

> “Git for everything“ would be a multi-billion dollar startup easily.

Worked on a “Git for Word” project [1], which is currently on hold.

The diff part was manageable, though not trivial to get diffs that make sense for prose/regular text.

The hard parts are UX/UI (making Git concepts transparent to “normal” users) and merging. Yet without automatic merging, branching is not very convenient.

Would love to collaborate on this in the future again. Reach out if you are working in this space, happy to share.

[1] https://julesdocs.com

I’ve had better than expected success with diffing word files by converting them to markdown via pan doc. It’s nowhere near perfect as you lose nearly all formatting, but if only the actual text content is changing it allows you to automate the display of those changes.

I don't think merging will ever be fully solved by software. It's a problem created and solved by process. How annoying merges are is entirely dictated by process.

Sourcetree is the best git GUI I've used. That could be used as a model.

I think an old-style solution to merging would be fine: output a word file that uses a unique font style to indicate which user made what conflicting changes, have the user edit the document and remove all of the "merge styles", then continue.

Yeah, in high school I and another student did our essay peer reviews using annotated diffs once. It was so much easier than Google Docs, since we didn't have to leave our editors.

Wrapping version control with a non-tech-friendly porcelain could help a lot of people escape user domestication from vendor lock-in.

I don't care how much porcelain you add. Using git effectively beyond add and commit requires undestanding quite a few concepts. Mass adoption of git in the consumer space ain't happening anytime soon.

> The number of files with names like “Report Final Final draft v3.docx” is truly staggering.

iirc this was the original pitch for Dropbox

> “Git for everything“ would be a multi-billion dollar startup easily.

Dropbox is valued at 8.5 billion

Dropbox version history is limited to 30 days (free plan) or 180 days (paid plan)[1].

I like Dropbox, but for documents, 30 days worth of version history is not fantastic.

[1]: https://help.dropbox.com/files-folders/restore-delete/versio...

The original pitch was "throw away your usb drive", I don't think file history came about until after 2010, but I'm not too sure and modern Google makes it impossible to find anything older than 2 years ago...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

> “Git for everything“

Just to show how useful this is here’s Indian Constitution with amendments as commits:

https://github.com/anoopdixith/TheConstitutionOfIndia

I mourn that StackEdit [1] got abandoned. It's online markdown editor that can use git as a backend. Fully cross platform editing (in browser) with synced all text. I used it with GitHub private repository for all my notes but editing on mobile was really buggy. So I moved to notion (unfortunately).

[1]: https://github.com/benweet/stackedit

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.

I think my Dropbox is already basically this. It has a revision history of my text files I think.

Dropbox does this but it’s limited to a certain number of days, so not the exact same thing. I love the idea of a simple hit for everything.

> "Git for everything“ would be a multi-billion dollar startup easily.

AIUI, git is already prepared to be that, it just needs diff programs that can handle whatever format. I mean, other than git's interface being its own impediment to non-technical users.

"Report Final Final draft v3.docx" is in a proprietary format format controlled by a single company. The spec may be open in some sense, but it's far from a level playing field.

I feel like this is a solution without a problem. Or a problem without pain.

Most people have no issues navigating a full folder of revisions to get to “Report Final Final draft v3.docx” but anything resembling version control would simply be unused. At corporate level, the version features of box.net, egnyte, and others are rarely used. I'd say most people don't even know they can navigate the revisions until they are in a data loss situation and asking about how to recover a corrupted file (which occurs most frequently with Excel files in my experience)

I wound up writing dupver https://github.com/akbarnes/dupver after getting frustrated with the lack of versioning tools for binary files. One neat thing about .docx files and their ilk is that they are "just" zip files so it isn't hard to add special handling to pull out their contents and run deduplication over that.

> “Git for everything“ would be a multi-billion dollar startup easily.

Version control with online MS Office and Google Docs seems to be going pretty strong.

git --everything-is-local

Which is the next thing. Git works just local and uses servers to sync. The purpose of servers is syncing and not depending on them. From this everything else comes, autonomous usage, speed, reliability, recovery.

"Git for everything" is the first thought I had when I opened this article. I am trying to keep all my notes in Google docs and it's all good as long as you stick to their format. I can't edit text files in Google docs ! I mean, how absurd is this.

I feel like building a Google docs clone for simple text files. Just one feature - versioning (A Time machine like interface) and perhaps add collaborative editing later. I just want to write and store a text document without having to create multiple files. Automatic versioning of snapshots so I can go back in time and refer to any timestamp.

Have a look at Etherpad.

Yup, that's basically the same argument I'm making with this diagram -- with text, you can get useful operations "for free"

http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2022/02/diagrams.html#text-narr...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30483914

It's generally not something you want to reimplement ...

> "Git for everything"

macOS Time Machine and Windows Shadow Copy aren't perfect git-based versioning systems, but it's nice something in the general direction exists.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Machine_(macOS)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_Copy

macOS also has support for local file history, even if many apps try to ignore these features: https://support.apple.com/sv-se/guide/mac-help/mh40710/12.0/...

When they introduces this they changed the standard file operations and replaced "Save as…" with "Save a copy" - this was not universally welcomed.

> “Git for everything“ would be a multi-billion dollar startup easily.

Didgets (recently surfaced here on HN) seems like a sane approach to this, from the file system up. Pretty incredible performance too.

https://didgets.substack.com/p/where-did-i-put-that-file

Sadly not (yet) open source, though the developer is considering it.

Isn't that what Google Docs does already?

I like this too, easily share is really a huge plus for any type of format text.

One of the big things I love about Dropbox is automatic version control of the file.

Google docs has a similar feature built in too I think.

I switched from dropbox to mega years ago when the former removed Linux support. TIL mega have version support so I need to enable that and try it out.

First thing I do on a new device is setup my mega shared drives - and there is a lot of plaintext files there!

It works well if the text format in question is line oriented, otherwise it doesn't.

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

As for "git for everything", try SparkleShare or LogicalDOC CE.

But can you use git for the .docx files?

You can, but .docx is binary (it's .zip, and the Word document itself is OpenXML)

So you won't have a neat revision history, unless you implement something in the pipelines to also convert .docx to something human readable, because .docx and OpenXML isn't.

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 simple text editor will not have: displaying images, live preview, relationships between topics, etc. It even has a Vim mode!

I use org-mode the same way. I have a flat directory with many small files, inspired by Zettelkasten and by simple wikis. No server, no dependencies.

This also works well for small organizations. Both GitHub and GitLab are able to render org files, with some minor limitations. Hence, a simple repository full of org files is already a wiki. Even local links just work, with zero dependencies.

It's possible to transform org files into HTML with some CI task to get support for all org features. But I have found this a bit of an overkill. I don't need most org features. The basics are already great: outlines, timestamps, hyperlinks, tables and footnotes.

You can achieve more or less the same things with Markdown as well.

There’s also org-roam, which introduces the bi-directional links that systems like Obsidian have. Just make sure you’re on v2.

This is truly the era of the memex.

The only problem with org (which may not be a problem for some folks) is that if you want to be able to edit org files with the least friction you need to use Emacs. I tried the org extension for VS Code and vim in the past and they just weren't quite the same as editing org via emacs.

This is exactly why I switched to Obsidian after trying a few others like Bear, Notion, and Craft. Let me see the files on disk! Don't abstract it away or hide it from me.

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 solution I've been able to come across.

A single cross platform app would be preferable, but the last time I used Obsidian it was slow, heavy, bloated, with a pretty ugly UI, likely in part due to running on electron.

Serious question: how do you square your third paragraph with your first? That is, if you're using Obsidian's features like [[square bracket link syntax]], or #tags, or inline images, aren't you effectively locked in to editors that support the same set of features?

Not really -- you're only locked in to the extent that Obsidian makes those things easy

If Obsidian went away, I'd still have a bunch of text files that I understood, and I'd know that I could find things tagged with #foo by using grep, that the [[links]] just mean to open links.md, that an image should be opened in a browser, etc.

It’s still all plain text.

Best practice for tags is just include them in the plain text file, and inline images in Obsidian is like Derek said — just keep them in your folder structures just like your text.

square bracket syntax is fairly well used in wikis. While there are varying degrees of user experience if you step away from Obsidian, it's still readable. You can go and convert the links to []() either inside Obsidian with a plugin or later with a script.

You'll be able to get access to it in 20 years, even if not in a shiny UX friendly way. Which is more than can be said for some of the really old notes I took in proprietary pieces of software.

And easy linking and bi-directional linking. Once you experience these two features it’s very hard to imagine notes without it. That’s the main reason I couldn’t go with the authors workflow of just plain text files.

I do wish they had a cheaper commercial tier that maybe didn’t offer priority support or something.

$50/year puts you next to some good developer tools, that already do markdown pretty well, and I just don’t see the point of writing notes if they’re not also for work.

I’m sure it’s worth it once you have 100s or 1000s of notes by i somehow feel like it’s a bit of a too big pill to swallow in the beginning.

You can use it free, mate. Just sync your markdown files via your favourite provider, or your own WebDAV, e.g. Nextcloud, or use a free sync plugin. There's even git plugins if you're a fellow nerd that wants version control.

Obsidian is great. I use Syncthing to share my "database" between all my devices. I can do some quick edits/take notes on the go and when I get home the changes are already mirrored to my desktop.

Been using obsidian for two weeks and the tagging / linking to documents is top notch, saving it to my internet drive at work brings out the best of all worlds

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

I love Obsidian, but I'm now beginning to move many of my documents to Notion for sharing with a team.

I really wish Obsidian, or something like it, worked well for teams. Maybe it's on their roadmap, I'm not sure.

Have you tried Athens Research? [0]

It is open source and everything is stored locally but not in markdown files. You can self-host the desktop app to share notes.

[0]: https://github.com/athensresearch/athens

How is notion? I heard it was slow?

Also, is real time collaboration a game changer or a gimmick?

I used to think the former, but was questioning it recently.

What would be lost with syncthing + obsidian for your team or maybe something that does autocommit like fossil for probable conflicts?

yeah, likewise, I have been using markdown and folders of files for ages, started to use Obsidian and it provides a nice editor for that, and yes, it even has a vim mode!

Plain text adoption often implies markdown for a richer experience, but we also have the wonderful https://orgmode.org markup.

There is no shortage of markdown-based tools on all platforms. Our org markup options, on the other hand, are very few outside of Emacs. Org markup itself is super versatile and can power lots of use-cases.

I built two org-powered apps for iOS myself:

https://plainorg.com

https://flathabits.com

There are other great ones out there:

https://beorg.app

https://logseq.com

https://organice.200ok.ch

https://orgro.org

http://orgzly.com

Lastly, a shoutout to Karl Voit who's been driving org markup awareness outside of Emacs with Orgdown https://gitlab.com/publicvoit/orgdown. He's also discussed org markup's strengths at https://karl-voit.at/2017/09/23/orgmode-as-markup-only

I've been intensively using Orgmode for a year and a half (wrote my thesis in it) and then abandoned it to switch to Markdown.

Orgmode quickly turns into not-quite-plaintext with humanly impossible to read and very distracting data structs stuck inside the text. I think these were called "Properties"?

For me the beauty of plain-text is that it can be read and written in any Editor without needing syntax highlighting. Here Orgmode fails for me, as I found it unreadable and unusable without an Emacs-esque toolkit.

I wouldn't call those plain text, if it doesn't keep your newlines by default, it's not plain text but a markup language like HTML

BBCode is nice and keeps newlines, but something that uses markdown's syntax for bold and titles, but doesn't remove newline characters, would be ideal

Don't forget asciidoc. Coherent, has markup for things like video etc. It's a superior format to markdown, a pity it's so unknown

As someone who lives in a terminal, I find @junegunn’s “journal” markup format a lot more pleasing to the eyes than Markdown — holy kaleidoscopic colours, batman. Bonus: in a weird way, the colours of journal trained me to love lisp.

[1]: https://github.com/junegunn/vim-journal

@xenodium Wow - impressive reviews for your ‘plain org’ app.

When I grow up with my eMacs and org usage (I’m only playing now as org is new to me - but I know it’s what I have been missing!!!) I for sure must give your app a shot for iOS usage

> There is no shortage of markdown-based tools on all platforms

Could someone name one decent md editor for Android?

And vimwiki!

>If you rely on Word, Evernote or Notion, for example, then you can’t work unless you have Word, Evernote, or Notion. You are helpless without them. You are dependent.

Although I deliberately avoid Evernote and Notion for those stated reasons, I'm fine with Microsoft Word. I've been using it for 20 years. It even opens my proprietary DOS WordPerfect ("*.wp") files from 1980s!

Sometimes I need more flexible layout of fonts and graphics and MS Word is the tool I use for that. Markdown isn't an alternative. (EDIT add: Markdown isn't powerful enough for the style of documents I write. E.g. MS Word has tools to overlay graphic elements like arrows and callouts floating as editable layers on top of screenshots. Markdown can't do that.)

I'm confident I can still use it as a tool decades into the future. Even if Microsoft became more user hostile and eliminated local install in future versions and required a cloud-only Office 365 account, I'll just keep using Word 2019. LibreOffice may also be a Plan B option to open docx files. Not nervous about MS Word files at all.

"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 all, you have access to HTML, CSS and JavaScript. It's not even close.

Markdown is actually awful. There's at least 3 different dialects that are all called Markdown, so if you want your text rendered it's a toss-up as to whether or not it'll look how you intend.

I think that Markdown's success is due to a lack of a widely-used, simple alternative that's well-specified.

Org is easily and objectively the best markup but of course it's only very very recently that there was a non-emacs implement worth a damn.

> Sometimes I need more flexible layout of fonts and graphics

That’s the key. For much of my writing, all I need is text with a little formatting, and markdown is great for that as a user. (It’s less nice if you’re writing a parser, but that hasn’t come up for me yet :) )

For some of my writing I need professional-grade layout. There I either use LaTeX directly, or I use pandoc then LaTeX.

But sometimes I need to:

- Include images that don’t have a public URL

- Use more than one font

- Have a recipient be able to edit the document

- And the recipient isn’t a developer

Markdown doesn’t check all of those boxes. Word files do (as do Google Docs links, ODF files, and some others).

Markdown is great, but it’s not enough all of the time.

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

HTML works quite well for images and text placement. Latex (and its derivatives) work even better.

Word isn't bad, so long as you keep paying your subscription.

> "Word isn't bad, so long as you keep paying your subscription."

Web Word is free, like Google Docs is. (Meaning, it costs your credentials and data rather than your money).

https://www.techradar.com/uk/how-to/how-to-download-and-use-...

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/free-office-on...

I disagree with the whole "NEED VISUALS OR GRAPHICS?" section. I do need visuals! I do need graphics! I'm not a typewriter, why must my flow be interrupted with me having to leave my document to open some JPEG file whenever I need to show something that isn't text?

It's not like this is crazy difficult or requires proprietary apps either. Writing a modern browser may be an impossible feat but I'm certain that it would take just a day or two to get a very simple barebones HTML renderer which supports <img> and a couple of formatting options.

At this point I wish we had a tty which supports variable width and size text and inline images and video. Then I could be happy.

It's 2022 and people like the blog author are all "who needs screenshots? who needs audio? who needs colours? who needs fonts or styles? who wants to see their handwriting strokes? who needs metadata? I use text because it's 1970!".

Hello? 4K video in my pocket, structured data streaming out of every system around me, all I'm supposed to want to capture is plain text? What a paucity of information, of detail, what an absense of dreaming, what a position taken purely from fear - never have nice things because you might lose them one day!

So when you need to remember a user/password combo for a new device, offline doorbell maybe, or a parcel number, or the address of a friend, then you record a 4K video instead of writing it in a text file?

Plain text just works, everywhere, all the time.

I mean you could also just use Markdown. Put the image in the same folder, so you don’t loose it, and then use a relative link from your text file.

If you are using a markdown viewer it should render nicely, if you are using a text editor there is just a path where the image should be, so also no problem.

Some editors like Typora can be configured to automatically save images next to the markdown file, which is really helpful.

> but I'm certain that it would take just a day or two to get a very simple barebones HTML renderer which supports <img> and a couple of formatting options.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

This tells me you've never actually tried this. For example the img tag allows you to, amongst other things, render an svg.

If you want a more full spec you can see here what it takes to render an img element:

https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/images.html

> For example the img tag allows you to, amongst other things, render an svg.

I don't think the GP meant "write an image renderer" when they said "get a very simple barebones HTML renderer". Most languages have libraries for encoding/decoding images in various formats, so aside from how it would fit into document layout, this is a non-issue.

What I said right before the part you quoted was "Writing a modern browser may be an impossible feat" and the part you quoted talks about a "barebones HTML renderer". What I'm describing is labels and images in a VStack. This is something any operating system UI toolkit (open source ones too!) can do.

> Every few years a new company says you should use their special format. You have to pay them a monthly fee to use it — or keep all of your documents in their care. [...] When you store your writing in one company’s unique format, then you need that program to access it. Then the economy takes a turn, they go out of business, and your work is trapped in an unusable format.

This is something I've been dealing with lately. I have over a decade's worth of important personal and work files in proprietary formats, since I used Windows and Adobe's stuff for a long time. These days I'm using Linux exclusively, so my only option to read many of those formats is to hope that things like GIMP and Inkscape are able to open them somewhat accurately. All the documents I created in InDesign are as good as gone. I still have the files, but they're locked behind proprietary software that I couldn't use even if I wanted to. Oh, well...

For creating documents I've been learning LaTeX, and for note-taking I quite like Vimwiki[1]. I don't do nearly as much graphics work as I used to, though I appreciate things like the fact that Inkscape uses plain SVG by default. I'd rather not be locked out of my own files again in the future.

[1] https://vimwiki.github.io/

> they're locked behind proprietary software that I couldn't use even if I wanted to

Hum, yes you could. The formats aren't dead.

It's like putting on a blindfold and saying you couldn't see even if you wanted. Just remove the blindfold.

Just install Windows or Mac.

I use plain text because there is no multimedia equivalent that is universal and end-user controlled, and there are no multimedia equivalents to Vim, Grep, regex, etc. Text is great, but an image, table, or diagram are sometimes irreplaceable.

We think we are great innovators, but we are stuck in 1990. Notice also that there are no Vim-equivalents for phones, even though that platform has been widely used for 15+ years.

Sorry Bill Joy; sorry Bell Labs; sorry (many more); we let you down, and we let down the public, which now has no integrated multimedia format beyond WordPress or Instagram.

I think we're right on the precipice of this changing. PDF has long been the preferred format for dead-tree-like documents. It isn't quite as open, cleanly designed or navigable as we'd like but it has the inertial force to continue staying in use for decades.

Lately I've been working with Inkscape and realized that SVG also has the capacity to be a freeform document tool, and one with a different default context than HTML(scrolling document) or PDF(paginated document). The default setup involves a canvas, it has a notion of object hierarchies that lets you browse content from an outline, it lets you embed assets and layout in a more-or-less arbitrary fashion, it can be coded with JS, and there's some (under-explored) possibility for structured accessibility. It just needs a viewer that approaches the format in a way that makes sense as a target for content creation, beyond its existing role of small vector icons and simple animations.

None of the existing formats have to work exactly right, they just have to be the starting point for a streamlined source; then make a direct viewer for the source and you have the integrated multimedia format.

I use Tiddlywiki. It's end-user controlled, and works in any browser. I think it usually flies under the radar in these discussions, but it's really surprisingly powerful, I've found. It's the data and tools in a single HTML file, which makes it uniquely resistant to bitrot. There's a bit of a learning curve, though.

There are plenty of text editors for phones; many of them cost very little. I don't find iVim very useful on a touch screen, but that's probably just me.

iVim is a very nice port of vim to iOS that is regularly updated: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ivim/id1266544660

Vim for phones sounds like trying to play doom on my fridge. Possible, not enjoyable.

I've tried a lot of different things over decades. And, after countless experimentation, I'm still at the same place...

I store data all over the place.

I have Evernote for long book notes and tracking financial data.

I'm using notion right now as my base of notes for learning how to build a cabin (toggles and embedding videos is wonderful).

I tried to really use roam and its off-shots for a while but could never really get into it.

And i use a new txt file all the time. Anytime I don't know what I need or going to do. And 90% of the time, I never look at them again but they're all in my one synced folder.

At the end of the day, I keep thinking I'll settle on one solution but I'm doubtful that's ever going to be true.

> and 90% of the time, I never look at them again

So, you’re a note squirrel. So am I. I’ve stopped caring or stressing out about it. I just accept that I’m never going to be overly organized or systematic.

I do keep all of my notes in a /notes folder or sub folder so that fuzzy find works nicely. That’s the extent of my organization.

I named my folder scribbles. It doubles as a trash bin.

Do you know https://obsidian.md/? It's a note taking app with plugins. There are some for todos and excalidraw for drawing on whiteboards.

I'm a Joplin user but I've been slowly learning Obsidian too. Level1Techs [0] did a fantastic primer on Obsidian and gave a thoughtful reflection on the zettelkastan method [1]. Josh Duffney's youtube channel [2] on Obsidian is also worth the watch too.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H69tRdemJiM

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettelkasten

[2] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCV1T7JbfzbE2O7P3kydmKw/vid...

Everyone was talking about Roam for a while, I wonder what happened.

The faithful are still on Roam. Others have moved to:

1. Obsidian: has bidirectional linking and knowledge graphs, is faster and better supported, but doesn't have the outlining structure that Roam is based on.

2. Logseq: basically an open source Roam with 90-95% feature parity and some cool stuff that is its own.

3. Foam/Dendron/Athens etc: Roam clones.

4. Notion/Evernote/something else entirely.

Maybe they all switched to Obsidian or org mode.

Roam costs money; Obsidian is free.

I came to this realization a few months ago as well. I had been using one note to keep notes and it got glitchy between devices, causing things to not appear. I’ve had multiple random losses of data like that.

Word documents and other special formats always break in different versions or operating systems. Or they get corrupted. Or they can’t do some basic feature like side by side comparison.

Apples note app deleted all my notes a couple years ago on some version update. It was apparently hidden somewhere in the terms of service. It’s impossible to get those back or rollback. Everyone on the internet says it’s my end user fault for not reading the apple TOS standard popup before pressing the default ok button one time.

There’s just an endless amount of problems. I put everything in text files in a set of folders now to sort it instead of tags that break, and nothing gets corrupted or loss. It also of course just syncs to google drive for version and backup.

I like it, it was fun to see the plain version at the end too.

Outliving formats is an interesting angle. I'm sure some of us know people who still use proprietary formats and software from the 1990s or earlier. They keep backups, but they keep using what worked for them.

Some years back I wrote a modernizing-controller for a Dreamweaver site behind a traditional craftsman's business that is doing pretty well, especially with the help of the web. The modernizations I needed to plan for were so many that they had to think long and hard about years remaining until retirement. The scope changes I received were super awkward because I could feel their frustration with new ways of doing things. It was strange to see things like the .dwt Dreamweaver formats still in use. They also used other proprietary software & formats.

But I do find it hard to imagine that text files (in the sense of the article) would have run the site at any point. Text files do take a bit of a stoic philosophy to really grok at some level IMO, and this has been true since maybe the '70s? The thing about text is, first of all the information is the expression framework. This is backwards for a lot of psychologies out there. The emotional components show up as decoration. Font color schemes, etc.

The article also mentions mind mapping and other tools. Those can be really important as a way to express what is inside the mind as a completely different type of process. Mind maps in particular address a problem of categorical expression, in a breadth-first context. This makes the visual itself a very useful format-as-framework. I find that I use them just enough (I have my own variant) that I keep a semi-yearly Freeplane file at hand even though I mostly use text.

Anyhoo. :-) Lots of good points in there. Thanks for sharing the article.

The nice thing about .docx is that it's a zip file full of xml. I'd be willing to bet that zip and xml are both readable in a hundred years, even if the specific version of .docx can't be loaded into a word processor.

I personally use emacs with writeroom-mode and markdown-mode plus some tweaks, but it's not realistic to expect everyone to go learn lisp and build their own text editor.

Yeah, proprietary formats are fine if they're easy to pry open and manipulate. Applications that store data in sqlite databases are also nice. The main issue is just getting locked into a single application because nothing else can read its bespoke binary file format.

think photoshop's psd :) https://github.com/gco/xee/blob/4fa3a6d609dd72b8493e52a68f31...

I tend to go for (simple) markdown rather than pure text files. It can be rendered into some fancy format, but the source code is also readable to humans. With chat apps like Slack and Discord taking it up, even non-technical people tend to understand what it means to put emphasis on something. You get the benefits of plain text with the ability to empathise, without fancy formats. Such a format also enforces paragraphs and lists to be consistent, which is great for easy of reading.

There are other, similar slightly-more-than-plain-text formats (RST is common among some communities, for example) with the same benefits, and everyone can pick their favourites and use them freely because in the end these formats are easy to parse as a human.

This is my experience as well. I admire anyone that goes full .txt but I missed how easily markdown allows me to hierarchically organize my thoughts via headings and sub-headings.

But author is not writing plain text files.

As he shows at the end he is clearly writing some mixture of HTML and some custom language that he uses to parse title, tags, and date.

I do agree that unless absolutely needed you shouldn't tie yourself to proprietary formats, but unless you are writing simple notes you probably want more functionality out of your files than actual plain text file can provide at which point you should instead use markdown.

Code I write, be it python, php, HTML or JS is still plain text as a format. I can open any of these code documents in any dumb text editor.

The fact that some other tool can do more with these files, parse them, execute them, "extract" some logic from them isn't relevant to the fact that I can open, read and edit these files as a pure and plain text file.

Therefore adding parsable parts/logic to files like YAML headers (or any self created style) doesn't make these files 'non plaintext'.

Following your logic would mean that doing any markup in a text file would make it somehow 'non plaintext'. I remember old Readme files with headlines being underlined by adding a new line full of - - - - (dashes). And stuff like this. Because these could theoretically be used to parse the files and extract headlines from the text.

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.

I personally use literal plain text for note taking. Previously I used One Note and other stuff, but when I saw how I just store plain text there I grew suspicious that something isn't right and indeed couldn't find a reason why it can't be text files in my text editor. In addition to that my text editor already has best text rendering settings I spent time tuning, and text editing functionality I'm used to - that's the functionality I expect from note taking software.

I'm puzzled, how people use markdown? For what? Just to make text more formal?

Markdown adds support for more formatting options, but biggest are links and images.

I'd say he does write plain text files, which he then converts to html when he wants to share it on his site.

The difference perhaps being that the note-taking/creating aspect is done in plain text, and stored as such.

Another advantage layers on the source control: many source code management services will render your markdown and give you a search interface. GitHub popularized it. But other hosts like Azure Devops and GitLab support this as well. You can make a relatively pleasant document management system on top of this.

You can even run this on your own computer without an internet connection. Working Copy on iOS supports. Gollum, originally created by Tom Preston-Werner, strives to be compatiable with GitHub's wiki feature [2]. For my part, I've been learning Rust by writing a clone of Gollum called Smeagol [3].

Though really the point of the original article is: all these tool don't matter. Your plain text files can live longer than any of particular tool and continue to be useful.

[1] https://workingcopyapp.com/

[2] https://github.com/gollum/gollum

[3] https://smeagol.dev/

Use Markdown. There are zero disadvantages when compared to pure text files as it's plain text but with syntax and extra features on some text editors.

The main advantages of writing plain text files: - source control - view/edit anywhere - doesn't get deprecated (Lindy effect) - easy to share - small size

There's no reason to use suites like MS Office and Google Drive unless your team is routinely using it or you need a WYSIWYG editor for publishing. Google Drive sometimes is bad for collaboration, user has to open link, login or install app compared to just sending the damn text. And, for the latter, just do all the creative writing in plain text and later format it or you will lose countless time fixing text formatting.

Google Drive is bad because: [1] Google may deprecate it or go away. [2] Google may decide that it doesn't want you as a user.

[3] Google may decide your data is too scrumptious to not take a peek, and possibly sell to the highest bidder.

One issue with Markdown is that there's many flavors with subtle differences in parsing/interpretation. If you're looking to be able to parse the file in the future, you have to be careful to pick a flavor with wide support or to stick to the most common features of Markdown.

Github Flavored Markdown (GFM) is almost a de facto standard nowadays.

For several years I was an avid notepad.exe + plain text files practitioner for capturing any note but have switched to using https://notable.app for capturing any adhoc notes.

It has the same in spirit & benefits of maintaining plain-text .md files in a static directory but has all the niceties of rich markdown, embeds, attachments, search and metadata captured in .md frontmatter to organize and tag notes with categories + pinned notes in a minimal, focused UI. I've tried many note taking apps but it's been the only that's stuck & replaced notepade.exe for me.

notable seems a lot like zim. I see Notable has (or will have) a paid subscription plan, on-line features like sharing, cloud synchronization, and encryption, but I didn't see a privacy policy anywhere.

The feature for built-in synchronization was proposed by its Author in 2019 [1], don't see any recent activity on when it will be available, it just says it will be opt-in via a paid subscription.

[1] https://github.com/notable/notable/issues/819

I see plain text with images/audio/video presented in their own formats, is html. Just, without the CSS and Javascript.

Adding in some script... maybe people would like https://tiddlywiki.com/

Open Source, usable on iOS and Android via apps. Is pretty much a self contained webpage but it allows drag'n'drop image files onto the edit box.

I was sick of all these services and apps with proprietary formats as well and starting writing markdown files organised in folders.

I've started a simple Bash utility for organising, searching notes and extracting TODOs out of them: https://github.com/hkdobrev/notetaker

I'd be glad if someone finds it useful.

there are benefits of writing in the text files and still people keep going to these shiny editors/systems. Why?

Keeping the excitement of using these things aside, they do make things easier. After using backlinks now, I don't think I can go back.

I like how easily I can publish Notion docs.

I like how I can use mems[1]-- they have reduced the conginitive load of writing in a sublime doc.

So, maybe we should try to find a solution which gives all the benefits of these "innovation" happening in this domain-- I say innovation with a quote cause I know how gimmicky they could look as most of them are but some of the features are actually part of the evolution.

logseq, obsidian are the steps in that direction.

I wish all these companies start addressing these issues. And in general we start having the culture of "bring your own storage" i.e get all your data in usable way. Not some text/json files which need specific programs to get anything useful out of that. A graceful exportation should be the primary feature.

[1] mem.ai

People keep coming back to shiny editors/systems because their employers demand it. Offices tend to like Word, as do book publishers. Yes, Pandoc, Scrivener, etc. will output your writing in Word format, but not all writers and office workers are tech people. They go with the simplest compatible/allowable option.

At my company, we create complex Word documents that are frequently edited. Using a different format (ie, a marked up text file run through Pandoc or LaTex) is far more trouble than its worth.

My personal stuff is in Markdown.

Same applies for bookkeeping. Though my .xls will probably outlive most applications, I'm certain that the csv version is readable decades from now. CSV is a poor format, so I'm using a plain text ledger [0] (specifically: the beancount[1] dialect).

I'm quite certain that no webbased SAAS accounting tool will be around in decades. But I'm certain my (git sourced) foo.ledger files are readable and parseable for ages. And if worst comes, they are human readable, so I could even just copy it over, or parse it, manually.

[0] https://plaintextaccounting.org/ [1] https://github.com/beancount/

FWIW: I chose the beancount dialect over the simpler hledger/ledger format because of the additional support for investments/currencies/assets.

Yes! I came here to specifically mention plaintext accounting

I'm also a beancount user. Having all of my data in plain text allowed me to write extra tooling so that I can generate higher-level reports than what beancount has built-in. (budgeting, cash flow, planning/savings, etc)

That tooling also has much faster parsing than beancount. Not a knock against beancount, just proving out the point about not being locked in to a particular binary implementation.

This is good advice, but (as he notes halfway through the post) "plain text" comes in a lot of forms.

I would also add that for life-long storage of "whatever" you do probably also need attachments. (I guess we could say “plain files”. And for those, more JPEG/PDF than .doc/.cwk (Hi mom! :) )

For a couple decades I used my IMAP mail server's "Drafts" mailbox as a kind of poor man's Notion|OneNote|Evernote|Blahblahnote. It supported plain text, and attachments. It was enough, and more importantly, not too much.

Today, I do use things like Notion and other locked-in products, just to know the landscape (sure has gotten better since the 1990s! wow!), but if it is anything more important than a grocery list (such as, say... scraps of my novel, baby name lists, pet name lists, boat name lists...) I make sure to use something like Logseq, Marktext, Obsidian, or yeah, just .txt.

Thank you for reminding me the IMAP "drafts" trick! I had been using it for 10+ years with pine/mutt but the transition to mobile killed it for me.

Quite the irony that smartphones as the most successful incarnation of modern computers are the antithesis to this.

Folders are hidden, no default text editor, lock-ins everywhere you look.

I don't think it's necessarily ironic. I'd argue that the "success" of the mobile and web app paradigms are in large part driving the plain text movement. It's almost as if a tipping point has been reached, where the complexity thicket of siloed everything, hidden everything, subscription everything has pushed people in the other direction, more so than proprietary formats just by themselves would have been able to do.

GitHub flavored markdown will be around indefinitely as will SQLite and HTML.

ODT probably will be too.

It sucks that storing files isn't really solved yet. Plain text needs some external means of sync. SyncThing is finally getting good again with new Android 11 features, but for a while it was limited to internal storage.

And there is, unfortunately, no SyncThing cloud providers(First person to extend SyncThing with messaging, make it embeddable in other apps, and make a cloud service will have basically a universal backend for FOSS apps and solve a lot of issues).

There also hasn't been good tools to actually work with the text files till recently, because android always seems to be 10 years behind desktop. You were pretty much stuck just using text editors, sans indexed search.

Plain text is wonderful, but the ecosystem to actually take notes with it is just now catching up.

I think of it as "content and presentation should be as independent as possible". This is the content side: don't bother with fancy unreadable formats.

I've been thinking about this as I try to think about my own personal website. I'd like to have my content versioned, but, was really not loving the idea of tying myself to even a static website generator.

This is where I still ponder an approach more like antora (https://antora.org), where you can have a "doc repo" vs a "site repository". Thus, the concept of a version is really obvious.

I've also recently reorganized my professional notes into... a git repo that is only structured markdown files, one file per day, organized by year/month. And... it just works great.

I think that this can be expanded beyond just "only use plain text for important documents". I think the heart of it is really, "use only proven, open (preferably standardised) formats for important files." E.g. Markdown is a proven format (plain-text-readable but not strictly plain text), so it is likely to stay readable for a long time, and it is an open format, so you can use it right now without paying for proprietary software - so it would be suitable to use for an important file. HTML also fits the bill, so it would be suitable to store documents. (It seems that the "plain text" of this article actually uses HTML heavily.) Or, if you are making vector graphics, save them as SVG files instead of Adobe Illustrator files. And so on.

You've got it exactly right. Years ago, I wrote "Any sufficiently important information must be indistinguishable from plain text", and your point is what I was trying to get at: if it's that important, make sure the format you use has tools that are as helpful, flexible, and degradation-resistant as those available for plain text.

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

I've been using iA Writer for all of my text and writing needs for many years, couldn't be happier.

https://ia.net/writer

Same! And I love it.

iA Writer user here too! Was wondering if it would show up.

Yep. Plain text. Offline first. I pretty much consider markdown a form of plain text, whether or not that point of view is orthodox.

The only two other doc tools I regularly use are

a) completely human-readable plain-text hierarchical notebook with almost no markup in its stored format,

b) an html notebook, whose file format is largely human-readable w/markup referencing images -- png and jpg.

a) is gjots2. File format close enough to plain text to be indistinguishable. I sometimes write entries in gjots2 in markdown. I mean, why not?

b) is Zim. Nuff said.

I've played with recutils, and it's nicely done. But I don't want to think that hard, or be that organized.

If I know I want to organize my text and massage it a bit more, I sometimes use an old text database program by Carlo Strozzi called nosql (no, not the nosql the web crowd thinks I'm referring to -- it predates that. It's relational, plain text, but not SQL, and it just uses standard nix utilities).

If I need version control for plain text, the now ancient RCS program is something I seem to be able to re-familiarize myself with much quicker than I can with git.

Now having said all that, if someone asks me to write/format a Christmas letter for them, well, out comes Libre Office Writer and it gets saved in docx. Why fight the universe?

I was also looking for a way to better visualize text as a set of notes while still using markdown and .txt, then I came up with the idea "Sticky notes + Markdown + Tabs, All in one .txt file"[1].

It's nothing fancy, just a prototype using electron and vanilla javascript, but it might be useful.

[1] https://github.com/zonetti/zonote

I like to write text-files whose content is wrapped into <pre> -tag.

After the pre-section I add:

Pre looks great in Verdana, in the default font not so great. You might choose to add the style-definition inline into the pre-tag directly. But I like a very simple start for my text-files which is just the <pre> opening tag.

You can wrap parts of the content into other tags like <h2> for headers.

I think plain files are great but really I take notes from far too many places and I want to take notes alongside my browsing. Most of what I write is always in response to something but its a response I don't want public. It's a weird zone to be in.

If anyone is looking for a note taking app that's pretty brain dead simple, I made one. This is really more about note taking on websites rather than general note taking. I also like to think by focusing on just the notes and making it feature complete at this point means that it will last for a long time.

https://leftwrite.io

https://leftwrite.io/how-to

One thing I tried to do was make sure everything is exportable and that backups are on you to maintain. This way the data is always in your hands even when its in mine.

Maybe because I'm in the echo chamber but it feels like everyone's looking for some sort of knowledge base system to use. Is this something only devs care about or is everyone on the planet trying to keep their thoughts on hand.

I keep all my txt file notes in GitHub repos, works great for me. One thing I’m still trying to solve, taking new notes while I’m mobile. I haven’t found a good easy way to create/edit notes and commit them to git while I’m on my iPhone. The GitHub mobile app does not allow editing. The GitHub website does but it’s clumsy to use on a mobile device.

Anyone have suggestions for a solution?

I have been using Working Copy[0] for this. It is super full-featured and the developer is super cool for making everything free for students through the GitHub Student Developer Pack.

[0]: https://workingcopyapp.com/

I am working on a Git bot that handles all the fancy stuff. So you don't need something else besides a git client on any device.

This has a few positive sides and negative points. I think the positive sides are more relevant than the negative ones.

https://github.com/i5heu/Tyche

I'm a bit of a fan: https://every.sdf.org/

He has a killer point:

Your writing should outlive you.

The End. Period.

PS: Eventually, if it's important enough, it should transcend mediums, including electronic. ones

I'm a big believer in this, but I use https://bear.app/. It supports the Markdown format and can export to .md files, but it uses SQLite under the hood, I believe.

What's amazing about this is that your thought archive is now searchable (which is fast in bear).

https://fsnot.es - FSNotes is a native (~100% Swift) FOSS app which I believe is modelled after Bear.app.

I have been looking at it for sometime now, from a distance.

Very active development. Lots of options. But it still doesn’t seem as stable as I would like it to be.

Though sometimes it seems kinda all over. For example - it lets you set a storage and then another storage for “git” handling id you’d like to use it. Adding external folder doesn’t import the notes, it just shows a folder there. Sometimes restarting the app does the trick, or just removing or adding again.

So there’s sync option (iCloud only), there’s storage location, there’s external folder addition, then there’s git as well. I am sharing it here because many of you might like these many features.

I still believe it has huge potential and I’ll give it a more full fledged try once it has a more reliable and transparent sync option unlike what iCloud sync is (my biggest gripe with iCloud sync is it doesn’t let me choose where I want to see/keep the raw files and there’s no versioning and if there is I’m not. It fails not in silence but radio silence).

I'd never heard of fsnot.es. It looks great. I bought Ulysses ages ago on Mac because I wanted a performant, native-app markdown app that supported external folders. Unfortunately, shortly after purchasing it Ulysses went subscription only. I had no alternative, so I kept paying. However, I don't used any of the advanced features, and I'm really overpaying when I have no iPhone, don't use iCloud, and just do simple markdown. I'll check out fsnotes to see if it can replace Ulysses for me.

I have considered switching from Android to iPhone, but I don't know how I'd do notes on it. For work I can't use iCloud. I can only use my company's backup solution. Then for my personal notes I have Android and Linux (desktop), so I can't use iCloud, so I use syncthing or Google Drive. If I went to iOS, I don't know how I'd get my personal notes on Linux syncing with iOS. All the native iOS apps only support iCloud.

Do you find text files to otherwise be difficult to search?

Would love a little low-power device with a text display, nice keyboard, long battery life and a unix OS for writing.

I've been in finance, consulting and private equity for 15 years before starting my own software shop.

Moving from proprietary, WYSIWYG formats (mainly MS Office) to markdown / code as a way of working has been a game changer. Traceability, scalability and productivity is an order of magnitude better.

I had a quick back-and-forth with Derek on HN a few weeks ago about applying this philosophy to a personal CRM system: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30329475#30334269

There is a reason we have many forms of distributing written ideas:

- use math functions in the document

- add visual sections for people to be able to quickly scan the document once printed

- use tables

- use pictures

- real time collaboration involving all of the above

This is great because you can choose something that fits your problem instead of being forced to type in plaintext.

One of the ultimate plaintext champions is (unsurprisingly) John Gruber, the "inventor" of Markdown.

One of my favorite facts about his site, daringfireball.com: You can add the extension .text to any permalink and it will render that page as markdown:

- HTML: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2022/03/01/mozilla-on-tind...

- Markdown: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2022/03/01/mozilla-on-tind...

Reposting what may be a relevant take on education and using text

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/joy-text-world-t...

Not quite plain text files, but... I've used them all - Notion, Roam, [insert any hyped app of the past 10 years here] - but then in the end, when a random thought pops up that I want to write down I always land back in Apple Notes..

Ah... good ol' ClarisWorks.

Whenever I need to write something longer than a small forum list I write it in Notepad++. I then copy the text into whatever editor I'm using to stylize it. It just seems way cleaner to write things in the editor that ignores style.

I also use sc (spreadsheet calculator), a terminal-based spreadsheet program which uses a plain text file format. Very convenient for dealing with tabular or numerical data, which would be cumbersome to work with on a textual file.

Last stable release for sc was 19 years ago (according to wikipedia). I guess it is perfect already :D

Yes, it's finished.

Here's another very similar project which follows the same concept and construct: https://jrnl.sh

PS. I am not the author or contributor just a daily user of it and i like it.

This looks interesting. Thanks for posting!

I've been using simplenote and kinda wanted to transition to plain text, the only thing stopping me is the mobile <-> desktop sync workflow which simplenote handles really nicely. Does anyone have any good ideas?

Glad to see another simplenote user in the wild! I’ve been using it for years, absolutely love it.

For me it’s not just the automatic syncing, but having a good app on all platforms that I really like using.

On my Mac, I also run a script that commits the simplenote db to git every hour or so and pushes it to Github. It's basically like a JSON file. So I don’t worry about simplenote getting shut down.

For org and iPhone users, I authored https://plainorg.com

https://plainorg.com/#syncing-your-data

Obsidian.md stores your notes in normal folders and plaintext files on disc, all attachments as standalone normal files. The company offers a mobile app and an end to end encrypted sync service (paid).

The basic app is simple, but has a good extensions API which means people can and have gone nuts with it.

Zim-Wiki is my go-to as it pretty much manages everything for you.

It mentions an advantage of not fiddling with formatting but I constantly switch between wiki markup, markdown, and even ini format; I can't help it.

I was a big fan of zim, but I have to admit it's falling behind the times (search is poor, graph view not useful, no collaboration, no mobile, tags are second class etc) so I reluctantly moved away from zim to amplenote.

That's the thing though, I'm only interested in offline first free software. I see no point in paying someone for my notes and I'm not collaborating with anyone on them.

With zim everything it just text and folders, easily done manually if I wanted it on mobile, but for that I just use markor.

I’d say that it’s not necessarily plain text files, but some text based formats, preferably open. Easy to parse, read and improve.

I follow something similar here, but with a difference that I don’t do anything in closed or binary formats, except for images and such binary only things, that I use only open formats. It’s being working fine - I also have everything in a source control (moved to git, currently).

As someone suggested here, there’s no better way to see changes over time when you need to see a previous version.

Some key points:

--There will always be plenty of free, non-commercial software in the public domain for reading and editing text files

--Whether future virtual reality, or a chip you can implant in your earlobe, plain text will be there

--Maybe it’s just another distraction, focusing on the tools instead of your thinking

--They offer some convenience or features, but at the cost of flexibility, portability, and independence

This is why I still love my AlphaSmart Dana running CardTXT. I have done a lot of writing with that machine, and it has never let me down. Even if it did, I could just swap out the SD card.

I've lost some old documents due to missing support of old file formats. I guess it would be possible to find some converters, but then again I'm too lazy to perform research on this topic, it is just like I'd like to look in one of those old documents from time to time (more personal history than actually important). So I tend to agreee with the approach of keeping things simple.

However using a note taking app that operates on plaintext (markdown) files like Joplin could be a good middle ground.

Agreed ownership of your notes is imperative. You do need some structure though. Try Logseq. I adopted Obsidian after Roam, but missed the low friction structure that Roam offered. But Roam was not secure and was proprietary. Logseq is the best of both worlds, is plain text based with minimal structure (markdown-ish) and is Git friendly. It's a work in progress, and needs a few files adding to .gitignore to minimise merge conflicts (pages-metadata.edn for one).

I think the easiest thing to write in is markdown. It allows you to define chapters, sections, subsections, lists, italic, bold, ... so all the basic things most of us would like to have anyways. It's very easy to read without a markdown renderer as plaintext for yourself and for others. You can automatically convert it to HTML, create a presentation, create a book, all quiet easy.

My amusing anecdote is that I've pretty much settled on Markdown, but I'm still struggling to completely wean myself of the habit of constantly looking at the rendered output alongside the text source. My entire work group is OK with Markdown now, and even the managers don't care any more. I wonder if the lockdown has resulted in communication being less formal overall.

What about PDF/A?

Considering that every browser, OS and printer has a reader implementation, and there is a spec defined, surely this makes it on par with plain text?

You could use any document editor (Word, Pages, Apple Notes etc), and as long as it can export to PDF you are no longer tied to the note taking companies proprietary software for reading and writing. Future indexing systems will surely support PDF.

PDF is explicitly designed as a final output format (and PDF/A is explicitly designed for archival purposes). They're good for that purpose, but it's literally like storing the digital version of a printed copy of a document rather than the source. That's fine if your only goal is preservation for reading, but preservation in a format that can be edited, converted, transformed, etc., lets out PDF as a target.

Yeh I agree, it’s write once read everywhere.

But if you need rich text and images, it seems like the only alternative to plain text.

> NEED HIERARCHY? Use directories — also known as folders.

I really wish I could define a custom order for files in a directory. A folder hierarchy is almost an outline, but not quite.

Yes I could prefix with "01", "02", and sort alphabetically, but those are cumbersome workarounds and reordering is a pain.

Are there file systems that allow for a custom order of files/folders?

> Yes I could prefix with "01", "02", and sort alphabetically, but those are cumbersome workarounds and reordering is a pain.

BASIC line numbering:

  010_...

  020_...

  030_...

I was just thinking about this at the weekend. One approach is to use a tool that supports [[Wiki-style Linking]], and have a kind of index/table of contents/home page for your notes.

That's what I do today in my own app. I have a "table of contents" file in each folder. Ideally the file system would support that out of the box, but maybe a first step could be to standardize such a TOC file...?

I suppose the question is where you want the sorted version to appear. In the output of `ls`? You could write a wrapper to `ls`, maybe?

In the system's file explorer (Finder/Windows File Explorer).

This would give me a visual outline and the ability to open any file with its corresponding app.

Imagine writing a book and using folders as chapters. You could then write individual pages with different apps, say some plain text, some Word documents, a few spreadsheets, images, videos, etc.

I do exactly this. http://len.falken.directory

Extremely relevant: http://len.falken.directory/misc/writing-for-the-internet-ac...

+1 for AsciiDoc https://asciidoctor.org/

Perhaps I’m too young, but I don’t find most of my writing relevant years later. Amusing maybe. So I don’t worry too much about the current platform I’m using being obsolete. I do want the ability to back up to plaintext with a single click though. And I do stick close to plaintext for its focus. Bear is the best compromise so far.

As you age, your memory deteriorates and you have more experiences to store in it.

I have been keeping daily notes on my work for about 8 years. It's really really really nice for cases where someone asks me something about a customer or technology or solution to a problem and I'm able to pull it up with a quick search.

> but I don’t find most of my writing relevant years later.

But that one little nugget that is relevant, can be worth a lot years later.

I'm a fan of text files. But many times you just want to capture the image and store it. For e.g. a bills/receipts. Secondly, the article doesn't talk about syncing - may be onedrive/dropbox? what are some good solutions here? Third, how do you do this (writing/editing notes) on a mobile phone?

Check out Obsidian.md

Proper notetaking app, can show images inline (but stores the note and image as a plaintext file and a normal image file, the text file just has a line for what image to show like:

/Notebook/Attachments/Bill.png

/Notebook/Notes/Bill.md

Bill.md contents:

Went to restaurant and got this for the trouble:

![[Bill.png]]

They have a full features mobile app and sell an end to end encrypted sync service for the app. It's as good as it gets, IMO.

I always fall prey to popular knowledge management apps or fads. And I still somehow come right on back to .txt files.

Write org files.

Now even vim had a mode for them. Check out what pandoc is.

Don't use agenda features though, it is a huge distraction.

Somewhat surprised no one has mentioned self hosting NextCloud - the Notes feature supports Markdown.

Any advice on syncing with iOS? I use iA Writer, but the syncing experience is awful because iA Writer is waiting for some sync provider (e.g. Dropbox) to implement the full iOS Files API, which it appears no one has done. That leaves iCloud as the only option.

I like plain text for the simplicity. It's easier to find my thoughts and focus on writing when the editor is as simple as a rock, otherwise I'll spend hours fiddling with the settings. Typically I use GNU Nano for its lack of features.

I write markdown via Obsidian and sync it across devices using syncthing. Works very well.

Joplin has a wysiwyg editor that stores the actual data as markdown, I like that feature.

You can even use an external editor to edit notes.

I write a lot of markdown files. Almost all my writings are on text plain markdown files.

This is exactly why I love Markdown and why I heartily disagree with this guy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30395130

Real question: what is the use case for viewing notes from 30 years ago?

Things that come to mind are evidence in a court of law and having fun looking back on old memories, neither of which seems worth the sometimes incredible amount of trouble.

Old journals, memories, historical data.

It’s not any trouble at all to maintain and requires very little space.

I’m not sure why it would seem like an “incredible amount” of trouble to you.

Novels and short stories.

Funny, I'm about to release my note-taking app which is plain text (xml) under the hood, handles heirarchy easily, and plays well with both version control (backups) and dropbox. Its windows tho... wanna try it?

Hijacking this article. But can someone reference me a "how to make Markdown look nice tutorial" I just have zero aesthetic intuition and would love some simple guidelines to follow.

A little ridiculous to propose that purely textual files are more portable than markdown files that are also text files.

What exactly is unportable about using asterisk for bullet lists and brackets for URLs?

> 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, Evernote or Notion, for example, then you can’t work unless you have Word, Evernote, or Notion. You are helpless without them

And you are absolutely helpless if you can't access your ASCII/EBCDIC/UTF8whatever plain-text files.

> Plain text can be converted into anything else.

Date: 2022.02.03

Is this March 3rd or February 3rd?

> NEED HIERARCHY

Sure. But in the year 2022 I want not only a hierarchy but crosslinks too.

> CONCLUSION

> Reliable

If you know the encoding. IF.

> flexible

See #date

> portable

See #date

> independent

Sure, but what about dates and encoding?

> and long-lasting

If on the suitable media. Good luck accessing your precious files on Google Drive when the mighty AI decided you aren't worthy to access them. Or your CD-ROM isn't readable because the last machine with working [0] CD-ROM compatible drive were thrown out 5 years ago because it can't run any modern OS[1]

> Plain text files will be readable by future generations, hundreds of years from now.

[x] Doubt

Real conclusion:

Sure, plain-text files are way better than binary blobs with unknown structure, but they are not a silver bullet. You still need to think about how, where and in what format to store them.

5/10, would not recommend.

[0] The last machine in my house with CD-ROM drive is X301 which is .. somewhere. My desktop's NEC-45xx was dead last time (6 years ago) I tried.

[1] CentOS8 performance with Gnome on ThinkPad X301 is abysmal to say the least. Even Windows 10 (!) runs better on it.

PS: to the kind person who bothered to downvote this comment: do you prefer your UTF encoded files with BOM or not? And your preferred editing software?

I didn't downvote you but your tone is overly dramatic for some simple heuristics. Specifically you're just repeating two things over and over. Here's some simple answers:

1) you're right that ASCII was English only, but now utf-8 is the defacto standard, backwards compatible with ASCII, and good for every language. Use that, no BOM needed and the BOM is discouraged by the standard anyway.

2) dates can be YYYY-MM-DD as per the ISO standard. Also they're sortable as a string too as a nice side effect.

All good?

Why can a vapid blog post from a famous person make the front page, but a serious, if slightly aggressive, response to it gets downvoted? Did everyone just want to circle jerk about how they too are just like famous person?

> Anyone who needs more than 26 letters (or god forbid non-latin ones) are fucked.

Anyone ... are fucked.

Hmm...

> If on the suitable media.

Hmm.

(Oh, and still February 3rd, obv. March 3rd would be 2022.03.03.)

Even if you don't want to use utf8, you can use any other text encoding, it's your files, nobody cares how you use them, do whatever works best for you.

I'll give you a 8/10 troll approval rank.

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

> 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.

Am I the only person who likes writing documents that are easy to read, easy to skim, and provide complex sets of data in a concise manner, including multi-media and hyperlinks?

Markdown is "plain text" (all "ascii"). Works great. Maintaining three Web sites and a couple of gemini:// sites and all are in `git` repos.

> HTML, Markdown, JSON, LaTeX, and many other standard formats, are just plain text.

Is parsing json (correctly) really markedly simpler/easier than parsing something like cbor?

My personal mantra is to use software/formats/etc that have been around at least as long as what you intend your content to last. Been there, been burned before...

I sometimes have to write things down in French. ascii is kind of clumsy for things like non breaking spaces. Anyone has a suggestion for this?

Plain text doesn't have to mean ASCII. Every major OS/text editor supports UTF-8.

UTF-8, which I think a lot of developers considers "plain text" now a days.

Out of pure curiosity: Why do you need non-breaking spaces? I don't think I've ever used one, and now I'm wondering if I am missing out :)

I really like obsidian for writing text files. Technically they're markdown, but I almost never look at them as markdown files.

serious question:

who of you actually used plain text (not even markdown) for all texts and notes for say a month?

And who changed back, why and for what occasions?

I've been doing this for a really long time (2003-ish).

I use vim mainly, and open in Mousepad before sending text to people via e-mail (plain text email of course).

Most of my knowledge base is in plain text. It is easy to 'find' and 'grep'.

Uncompressed PCM-based audio and bitmap-based image formats are also similarly simple, portable, and future-proof.

I just use Google Docs, I can access it on any consumer computer and I’m pretty sure there’s an offline mode.

I agree. Google Docs is mediocre at WYSIWYG and interoperability, but boy does it solve long term storage. I don't have to worry about paying for Dropbox or having local files that I can't search quickly unless I am on a Mac with Spotlight or have full indexing on Windows or the Linux equivalent. I don't have to worry about the folder structure and the files can't vanish with an SSD failure.

And, unlike text files, it's easy to insert images and tables in a Doc file.

Right, I like my raw data in the places it’s needed because the world isn’t perfect and sometimes we have less resources.

I can’t shake the ridiculous feeling that comes with typing plaintext journal entries on a gaming pc.

Until you get deplatformed.

How so?

I write all my notes for day to day in a plain text file on my desktop much better than a notepad tbh.

Other advantages: They are trivial to compress, and work nice with version control.

I do this forever. I have most o my important docs as a simple text files.

i tend to make an exception for sqlite, but otherwise i’m much the same.

Obligatory link: https://www.cqse.eu/en/news/blog/no-such-thing-as-plain-text...

Plain text is great, I get the gist of Derek's post, but encoding of a plain text file is a whole other beast.

My boss used to write emails in Word and email those as attachments.

funny, I almost agree with using text - except my goto is Excel. All my thoughts, todo lists, etc always in Excel. I guess I like compounding numbers too much =)

Only the formats which used by majority will long live.

Use directories — also known as folders.

Easily searchable too.

Wait until this person hears about Markdown.

Promotes plain text files

Writes HTML tags

:shrug:

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, or utf-8, and still potentially has problems being read on other machines.

It's reasonable to say that ascii has become so ubiquitous as to be universal, but it definitely wasn't always so, and won't definitely always be.

[1] Okay, I love to be pedantic

You can't be pedantic and then say Word and Excel are files. They're applications.

On a more serious note, ascii and nowadays utf8 are customarily considered plain text, the fact that a specific charset is used doesn't mean it's not text.

> 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.

indeed, why not use real plain text – not markdown.

Homer was able to write the fall of troy and Shakespeare Hamlet without bold text.

So what can't one express without?

There's still EBCDIC systems being used.

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.

Older Word (doc) and Excel (xls) files aren't "zipped" and aren't plain text files.

> This definitely isn't true

Yes, actually it is.

> and it kind of misses the point that there's no such thing as "plain text".

Who here made such a point? Anyway, that's not true either.

> It's still encoded in ascii, or utf-8

So, plain text files.

> and still potentially has problems being read on other machines.

What "other machines"? What problems? What matters is the software, not "machines".

> It's reasonable to say that ascii has become so ubiquitous as to be universal, but it definitely wasn't always so

I was alive when EBCDIC was common, but that isn't relevant.

> and won't definitely always be.

Sure, there's the heat death of the universe eventually.

When plain text is zipped, it is no longer plain text and as such it does not take advantage of all the things that can be done with simple text files, unless there is additional tooling, which again unzips the zipped files. This creates some friction of course. General tools do not bother with implementing a knowledge about every format on the planet, so those zips stay zips and are treated as bninary data by version control, which makes them not too useful.

> 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".

Words have meaning

Prose are Powerful

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?

Maybe, but there's no reason to use an ASCII-only text editor. (Almost) all modern text editors use UTF-8. And UTF-8 stores all the characters in the 7 bit ASCII table the same way ASCII does.

The result of that is, so long as you don't add any emoji or anything to your documents, a 2022 version of VS Code will store your text files in the same format as vi did in 1976.

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.

Numerous modern editors support ASCII. There's no reason to want one to only support ASCII, and it certainly isn't required to deal with plain text notes.

Where do you store them now?

And 2 KB is 2 thousand characters ... "pages and pages" of notes sounds like more than that.

One nice alternative is a clipboard widget for your OS that strips formatting and other stuff out. I use "PureText" on windows to remove formatting and it works great for me for many things, though it only strips rich text formatting.

Most of them should have an ANSI setting. It might be stashed as an option in the save dialog. If space is really an issue, zip them. Plain text always compresses wonderfully.

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