2025-02-03 -- the immediacy of plain text
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In his "styleguide" [1], m15o mentions something that I have
noticed as well: the primordial, pristine, primal, primitive
immediacy of plain text.

We let sets of rules like Markdown influence our thought. We
think our writing has to be consistent with other styles, or
even within the same document. It does not.

You can space out, or indent, or center, or right-align your
lines however you want. Does indentation mean the start of a
new paragraph or the continuation of an old one? Does a line
break transport meaning like in poetry or code, or is it the
result of some justification algorithm? Do you mark headings
with underlines, or let them stand by themselves? Readers of
your text will know either way.

Remind yourself: plain text is written by humans for humans.
And humans are good at pattern matching. If you can see what
you mean, others will see it too. The goal is to communicate
-- to make yourself understood.

A vertical bar can mean the border of a table, a Boolean OR,
a marker for quoted text or poetry or code. A tilde can be a
symbol for approximation, or singing, or the home directory.
Your bullet points can be * or + or - or o or something else
entirely. You can do whatever you want.

The bytes you place on the grid of your text editor are like
a mosaic. And truly: in plain text, man is still the measure
of all things.

[1] https://nightfall.city/nex/in/m15o/notes/styleguide.txt
    or nex://nightfall.city/nex/in/m15o/notes/styleguide.txt
    which actually just works the same way as
    gopher://nightfall.city:1900/0/nex/in/m15o/notes/styleguide.txt