[HN Gopher] Write plain text files
___________________________________________________________________
Write plain text files
Author : sivers
Score : 671 points
Date : 2022-03-01 23:35 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (sive.rs)
(TXT) w3m dump (sive.rs)
| oftenwrong wrote:
| Uncompressed PCM-based audio and bitmap-based image formats are
| also similarly simple, portable, and future-proof.
| every wrote:
| I'm a bit of a fan: https://every.sdf.org/
| xenodium wrote:
| 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
| dm319 wrote:
| And vimwiki!
| tveyben wrote:
| @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
| xenodium wrote:
| Nice to hear. Thank you. Enjoy your emacs + org journey! It's
| quite a fun ride.
| atweiden wrote:
| 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
| Aardwolf wrote:
| 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
| urlwolf wrote:
| 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
| maleldil wrote:
| Why do you think it's superior to Markdown?
| mrpotato wrote:
| I was also interested in the answer to your question.
| Here's[1] why AsciiDoc thinks it's better than Markdown.
|
| [1]https://docs.asciidoctor.org/asciidoc/latest/asciidoc-
| vs-mar...
| altgans wrote:
| 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.
| seanw444 wrote:
| That's a fair gripe, as an Org-mode+Emacs user. I certainly
| see the clunkiness you experience in its structure. But for
| me, I find it highly unlikely I'll ever use an editor other
| than Emacs for anything but basic and quick editing. For
| things as comprehensive as to necessitate writing in Org-
| mode, I'd rather do it in Emacs anyways. Need to port it to
| another editor? Two options: Org-export it to a more portable
| format, or get started on a comprehensive integration for
| Org-mode in the new editor.
|
| I personally would be willing to put the time into developing
| Org-mode functionality on-par with Emacs, in a new editor, if
| the new editor were to have major advantages over Emacs. But
| I don't think I'll come across one for a very long time.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| Yeah, I agree. I use org, but if I'm writing a document I'm
| in Markdown, not the Org markup. It's just noisy.
|
| Emacs partisans are often very, very sure that the emacs way
| is always the best way, sort of like evangelicals. (And I say
| this as a guy who has emacs and orgmode open all day, every
| day.)
| jerrygoyal wrote:
| > There is no shortage of markdown-based tools on all platforms
|
| Could someone name one decent md editor for Android?
| Singletoned wrote:
| 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
| [deleted]
| severak_cz wrote:
| > 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.
| senko wrote:
| 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.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| 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.
| usrbinbash wrote:
| > 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.
| pubby wrote:
| There's still EBCDIC systems being used.
| mro_name wrote:
| 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?
| pid-1 wrote:
| > without bold text.
|
| Are you sure they didn't use bold text, though?
| mro_name wrote:
| maybe a thicker quill from a larger goose?
| grey_earthling wrote:
| If anyone in this thread has a talent for writing that
| compares to either Homer or Shakespeare, then we're in
| excellent company!
|
| The rest of us, who can't necessarily achieve the desired
| effect through words alone, _need_ typographic assistance
| -- much like how I would need a bicycle to keep up with
| Haile Gebrselassie.
| cpressland wrote:
| 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.
| usrbinbash wrote:
| > but out of the box it can't.
|
| Even if such a device needs to be used, decoding ascii is a
| trivial lookup operation, not remotely comparable to
| decoding some arcane binary format, or a convoluted XML-
| derived format such as they are used in WYSIWYG editor
| formats.
|
| Yes, text relies on an encoding standard. So do numbers
| btw. (big/little endian, 2s/1s complement, sign/magnitude,
| floating-point representations), element enumeration (0 vs
| 1 based indexing) and even boolean logic (eg.: 0 is true in
| bash, everything else is false)
|
| At the end of the day, computers represent only 2 states:
| On and Off. Everything beyond that, needs an encoding.
|
| And some of these encodings are, at this point, both so
| universal and simple, that they can be considered as much a
| standard of the IT world, as 0 and 1. ASCII is one of
| those.
| nextlevelwizard wrote:
| 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.
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| 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?
| nextlevelwizard wrote:
| Markdown adds support for more formatting options, but
| biggest are links and images.
| sdoering wrote:
| 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.
| nextlevelwizard wrote:
| 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.
| sdoering wrote:
| Interesting interpretation of my words. Or should I say
| projection? Nothing to do with what I said. But if it
| pleases you. I am fine being an incoherent and unsavable
| something.
|
| As said. There is no technical difference between a txt or
| a php file. I can both run through cat and grep stuff.
|
| Are there special programs that interpret the contents
| differently? Sure. The same with the difference between a
| php and a py file. Different interpreters doing different
| things because of different definitions how to 'read' the
| content.
|
| All pure text, just different languages.
|
| To borrow from your metaphor:
|
| One is Earl Grey. One Darjeeling. One might be Green Tea.
| One (God forbid) herbs as tea.
| 0xad wrote:
| No.
|
| Open up a word document (.docx) in hex editor (head -80
| foo.docx | xxd) and you'll see it's not a plain file on a
| binary level. Now do the same with any python, php, html,
| and js files and you'll see that they're plain files.
|
| That's the difference that Derek is talking about.
| [deleted]
| toomanybeersies wrote:
| .docx files are just zip archives of XML files.
| nextlevelwizard wrote:
| That makes the article extremely silly, actually almost
| pointless.
|
| If you don't see difference between _plain_ text files
| and text files then that 's pretty much it for this
| conversation.
|
| EDIT: just to hammer this point home; if you gave me a
| task to write a report in plain text and I delivered a
| .txt file with some custom markup language, would you
| consider the task to be completed satisfactorily? I
| wouldn't. You can argue that the specification of the
| task didn't exclude custom markup language, but any sane
| person would understand what plain text file means.
| sdoering wrote:
| Why not. If there is a tool like pandoc parsing and
| translating your text and markup to anything (html, pdf,
| word docx, etc). Why not. I did that quite often at a
| former job.
|
| All version controlled in git.
|
| A few markup headers. Text formatted in markdown. Later
| combined with a bit of templating logic to ensure
| different looks (one for client and one for agency) when
| translating it into the final designed report.
|
| Actually more efficient than creating the two target
| documents with design from the beginning as the reports
| quite often changed in structure while being prepared due
| to changes in requirements.
|
| Separating content from (re-)presentation was a time
| saver.
| zkldi wrote:
| If I piped that .docx file into bas64, would it then be a
| "plain file"? It's ascii plaintext chars.
|
| I don't think your argument holds any water.
| jerrre wrote:
| 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.
| justsomeuser wrote:
| 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.
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| 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.
| justsomeuser wrote:
| 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.
| glacials wrote:
| 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.
| runjake wrote:
| 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.
| themadturk wrote:
| Novels and short stories.
| [deleted]
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| I just use Google Docs, I can access it on any consumer computer
| and I'm pretty sure there's an offline mode.
| fartcannon wrote:
| Until you get deplatformed.
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| How so?
| copperx wrote:
| 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.
| sedatk wrote:
| _Promotes plain text files_
|
| _Writes HTML tags_
|
| :shrug:
| gatonegro wrote:
| > 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/
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| > 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.
| bob66 wrote:
| mr_tristan wrote:
| 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.
| CA0DA wrote:
| Joplin has a wysiwyg editor that stores the actual data as
| markdown, I like that feature.
| cryptos wrote:
| You can even use an external editor to edit notes.
| cryptos wrote:
| 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.
| janvdberg wrote:
| 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.
| Dave3of5 wrote:
| I write all my notes for day to day in a plain text file on my
| desktop much better than a notepad tbh.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| 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?
| mythz wrote:
| 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.
| autoexec wrote:
| 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.
| mythz wrote:
| Privacy policy for what? it just writes static .md text files
| to your local folder.
|
| 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
| MarkSweep wrote:
| 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/
| strken wrote:
| 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.
| jamesgeck0 wrote:
| 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.
| Anunayj wrote:
| think photoshop's psd :) https://github.com/gco/xee/blob/4fa3
| a6d609dd72b8493e52a68f31...
| NWoodsman wrote:
| 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?
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| I like to write text-files whose content is wrapped into <pre>
| -tag.
|
| After the pre-section I add:
|
| <style> pre { font-family: Verdana; } </style>
|
| 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.
| berkes wrote:
| 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.
| bstpierre wrote:
| 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.
| harha wrote:
| 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.
| AlanYx wrote:
| 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.
| e-dt wrote:
| 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.
| saintaardvark wrote:
| 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.
| sublimefire wrote:
| 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.
| jasode wrote:
| _> 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.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| "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.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| Asking people to become web devs to get the kind of
| formatting Word makes trivial is not a winning argument.
| na85 wrote:
| 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.
| approxim8ion wrote:
| I get that Markdown is expected to be rendered into HTML
| eventually, but I find the syntax useful in its raw form
| too, just for formatting text files.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| >Org is easily and objectively the best markup
|
| I laughed.
| Seirdy wrote:
| Then pick a standardized dialect. Commonmark is the lowest
| common denominator; GFM is useful for when you need some
| extra features. Markdown also allows HTML for whenever you
| need something fancy.
|
| The advantage of markdown isn't robustness, it's
| simplicity. Preteens can get a handle on it in minutes when
| using Reddit.
|
| The main benefit that all these markup-shorthands serve IMO
| is getting people to add meaning semantically rather than
| with presentation. Word processor users typically adjust
| font size and color to make headings, even when given a
| list of headings right in the ribbon. Markdown is just an
| HTML shorthand: you can only work with semantic meaning.
| na85 wrote:
| >Markdown also allows HTML for whenever you need
| something fancy.
|
| Indeed and therein lies what I view is Markdown's worst
| feature.
| Groxx wrote:
| While I broadly agree, particularly because it feels so
| fuzzy about when it starts interpreting it as raw HTML
| and when it goes back to markdown... I'm not sure how you
| can really claim Org is unambiguously better (best!) when
| Org mode has multiple flavors of almost exactly the same
| kind of feature. E.g. inline HTML in Org is:
| https://orgmode.org/manual/Quoting-HTML-
| tags.html#Quoting-HT...
| @@html:<b>@@bold text@@html:</b>@@
|
| Or inline LaTeX, which is arguably much worse than
| markdown's HTML fuzziness:
| https://orgmode.org/manual/LaTeX-fragments.html#LaTeX-
| fragme...
|
| > _To avoid conflicts with currency specifications,
| single '$' characters are only recognized as math
| delimiters if the enclosed text contains at most two line
| breaks, is directly attached to the '$' characters with
| no whitespace in between, and if the closing '$' is
| followed by whitespace, punctuation or a dash._
|
| If I understand that correctly, it means this is LaTeX:
| $a^2 +1 =b$
|
| But this is not: $a^2 +1
| +2 =b$
|
| Similarly, this is apparently an inline chunk of LaTeX:
| https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/39527/which-
| count... USA tends to use $123 to show
| dollar amounts, but e.g. Germany apparently
| sometimes uses 123$.
| tdhz77 wrote:
| Most of these differences are managed rather easy.
| ddulaney wrote:
| > 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.
| falcolas wrote:
| 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.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| > " _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...
| imgabe wrote:
| 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.
| phreack wrote:
| 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.
| ben174 wrote:
| 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
| robin_reala wrote:
| My official CV is a page on my site, that I print to PDF if
| someone asks for it. The page itself is as source-
| controlled as the rest of the site.
| vertis wrote:
| 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.
| Zak wrote:
| 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?
| sslayer wrote:
| LOL,sweet summer child, its all 0's and 1's
| munk-a wrote:
| Please explain, in 0's and 1's how to combine the change
| to add a dark splotch over here and a patch of blue over
| there so that the image you get out of the merge has both
| the dark splotch and the patch of blue... without
| teaching git how to comprehend image file formats (and
| assuming you're not using a bitmap which is sort of a
| free win).
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > "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.
| loudmax wrote:
| "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.
| sgjohnson wrote:
| > is in a proprietary format format controlled by a single
| company.
|
| It's not proprietary by definition. A nightmare to
| implement? Yes.
|
| But definitely not proprietary.
| _dain_ wrote:
| It doesn't follow the published open spec so it is de
| facto proprietary.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Right, but if that company released a diff tool for docx
| (or someone reverse engineered one), git would work with
| it. I don't expect that to happen, I'm just saying _git_
| isn 't the limiting factor.
| sgjohnson wrote:
| Pre-commit hook to convert to plaintext or markdown[0].
|
| And there you go, a human readable diff.
|
| [0]https://github.com/benbalter/word-to-markdown
| Swizec wrote:
| > 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
| ovao wrote:
| 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...
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| 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
| slightwinder wrote:
| It's not that hard to search for old content on google.
| Just limit the year in the search filter. Anyway, I found
| mentions of this feature up to 2008 back. I guess it was
| there since mostly the beginning.
|
| From Sep 15, 2008: https://www.maketecheasier.com/dropbox-
| backs-up-and-syncs-fi...
| yakubin wrote:
| 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.
| pmeunier wrote:
| > 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.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Have you tried git rere?
| yakubin wrote:
| No. That's the first I'm hearing of it. Thanks. I'll try it
| in the future.
| Hackbraten wrote:
| 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.
| FreezerburnV wrote:
| I had no idea these options were a thing. Thank you for
| pointing them out, adding them to my config immediately and
| hoping it makes some merges and whatnot easier going
| forward.
| pmeunier wrote:
| Hint: rerere doesn't always work. It's still guesswork,
| like the rest of merges/rebases/cherry-picking in Git.
| This is because looking only at the tips of branches
| doesn't work, and that's the only thing Git can do (with
| or without diff3 as the merge algorithm).
| Nullabillity wrote:
| 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.
| yakubin wrote:
| When I have a chain of commits pending review on Gerrit,
| and I fixed some flaws in the first commit in chain and
| need to rebase the dependent commits, merging is not an
| option. And rightly so: when I look at the master branch, I
| don't want to see random corrections someone made during
| review, they're just irrelevant once the reviewed changes
| are merged.
|
| There are many reasons why linear history is important.
| Rather than saying that "you shouldn't want to do that",
| I'd prefer it if the tools people use were fixed to better
| serve the things people actually want to do.
|
| A merge would only make sure that I don't need to resolve
| the same conflict multiple times. It wouldn't result in the
| conflicts not being generated in the first place, or them
| being saner. The only difference in conflict resolution
| between rebasing and merging is that the sides are flipped
| (what's shown on left in rebase, is on the right in merge,
| and vice-versa). Which doesn't address the second issue I
| listed: conflicts are not only repeated, but the conflicts
| themselves are pretty crazy. In my example, often-times C
| would never even touch files which were detected as having
| conflicting changes with A or B. It was pretty absurd that
| I would have a 3-line change in C, several hundred-line
| changes in A and B, yet the biggest conflicts would be
| triggered when rebasing C on top of B, and those would be
| in files C did not touch. Other times diffs in conflicts
| would have most of the lines added and removed actually
| identical, with only a couple in the middle different. Why
| would git mark them as conflicting, is beyond me. And then
| there was the issue of git not detecting conflicts, when it
| should have, instead merging changes in a way that broke
| source code. None of those issues is better handled by
| merging than by rebasing. Most of them however have pretty
| good solutions in a patch-based version control system, as
| opposed to snapshot-based like git (conflicts in files
| which weren't changed? not going to happen). An even better
| solution would be binary formats with domain-specific merge
| logic, like the one in KeePassXC.
| Nullabillity wrote:
| > When I have a chain of commits pending review on
| Gerrit, and I fixed some flaws in the first commit in
| chain and need to rebase the dependent commits, merging
| is not an option.
|
| No, you just add it at the end of the commit chain?
|
| > And rightly so: when I look at the master branch, I
| don't want to see random corrections someone made during
| review, they're just irrelevant once the reviewed changes
| are merged.
|
| git log actually has the --first-parent for this, which
| hides all of the commits that were merged into the
| branch, without destroying the history when you try to go
| back and try to understand why the choices were made. The
| idealized version of history created by constant rebasing
| serves neither purpose.
|
| > Rather than saying that "you shouldn't want to do
| that", I'd prefer it if the tools people use were fixed
| to better serve the things people actually want to do.
|
| Agreed, tools that cope poorly with merges should be
| fixed, rather than forcing people to hack around it by
| rebasing.
|
| > None of those issues is better handled by merging than
| by rebasing.
|
| Not quite, rebasing generates more false positives, since
| it tries to merge every intermediate commit instead of
| only looking at the end states and the common ancestor.
| greyhair wrote:
| 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!
| chupchap wrote:
| Isn't that what Google Docs does already?
| ryanqian wrote:
| I like this too, easily share is really a huge plus for any
| type of format text.
| thrwawy283 wrote:
| 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.
| goosedragons wrote:
| 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.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| >>> 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?
| copperx wrote:
| 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.
| thrwawy283 wrote:
| Admittedly, if there's any chance to this I think it will
| start with tech-savvy assistants helping to preserve
| documents on the backend of things. When a process takes
| hold budgets usually get restructured and a dedicated
| application is contracted around the existing process or
| data. I'm at minimum trying to prove the value of strict
| version control in my space :)
| JohnL4 wrote:
| 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.
| nuker wrote:
| But can you use git for the .docx files?
| sgjohnson wrote:
| 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.
| vishnugupta wrote:
| > "Git for everything"
|
| Just to show how useful this is here's Indian Constitution with
| amendments as commits:
|
| https://github.com/anoopdixith/TheConstitutionOfIndia
| D13Fd wrote:
| 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.
| jsmith99 wrote:
| 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
| thrwawy283 wrote:
| Thank you for sharing this. I had no idea it existed! I was
| getting pandoc cleared at my work, but for the Windows
| environment that it is, this is another solution :)
| bodge5000 wrote:
| 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
| thrwawy283 wrote:
| 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
| xerox13ster wrote:
| That's not plain text and not easily parse-able with mutli
| document search
| wildzzz wrote:
| 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.
| srazzaque wrote:
| 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.
| jmmcd wrote:
| I've seen online Word become extremely slow even for small
| documents with a few editors.
|
| It doesn't help that there are lots of versions of online
| Word - there's the one that lives in Sharepoint, the one I
| get to via Outlook, the one in Teams, and (maybe? somehow?)
| the desktop Word when editing an online file.
| CorrectHorseBat wrote:
| 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.
| yarky wrote:
| I agree, I also expected the whole office365 ecosystem to
| do what's supposed to, but I also found it useless due to
| the slowness and errors the whole team kept getting while
| working on the same file. That and the fact that it somehow
| feels like the Mac version of their products always comes
| with a bonus bug. Don't event get me started on their web
| versions.
|
| It's the little things...
| D13Fd wrote:
| Were you using it on Linux or something? Or maybe with very
| large documents?
|
| I use it every day and really haven't had slowness issues,
| even when running via Parallels on the Mac side. Of course,
| typically my docs are <100 pages and light on images.
|
| I have seen undo history go away when edits collide with
| multiple users, but that's really the only way it could
| work. And you can still view old versions of the doc if you
| need to retrieve/restore something.
|
| MS Word as a whole is definitely very far from flawless,
| but it's still better than the alternatives I've seen, and
| it's extremely entrenched. That's why it's hard to see "git
| for office docs"succeeding.
| CorrectHorseBat wrote:
| >Were you using it on Linux or something? Or maybe with
| very large documents
|
| ~250 pages, ~100 images, not something I expect a modern
| computer to struggle with. We used the web version on
| Linux sometimes, but I think it also happened when we
| didn't.
|
| >I have seen undo history go away when edits collide with
| multiple users, but that's really the only way it could
| work. And you can still view old versions of the doc if
| you need to retrieve/restore something.
|
| The other way is like git does it, manual merging and
| conflict resolving. I don't think there's a way around
| that once you work with enough people together on a file.
| D13Fd wrote:
| That makes sense, although obviously the downside to a
| manual check-in/merge process is that it greatly slows
| down the editing flow.
|
| Personally for the kinds of documents I work on, I'd
| rather risk losing my undo history than have to deal with
| manually merging changes from multiple users.
|
| Plus, without real-time concurrent editing, the changes
| are much more likely to conflict.
| zouhair wrote:
| 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.
| accrual wrote:
| > "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
| m_eiman wrote:
| 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.
| bob1029 wrote:
| > "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.
| jollybean wrote:
| 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.
| brightball wrote:
| 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.
| innomatics wrote:
| 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!
| brightball wrote:
| Been using it on Linux for many years but it does feel like
| their Linux support has gotten worse.
| orhmeh09 wrote:
| Dropbox removed Linux support? It seems to work fine for me
| on arch Linux with btrfs.
| 10729287 wrote:
| If I remember well, they removed the ability to host
| Dropbox folder on a encrypted drive.
| innomatics wrote:
| It was sync specifically, and four years ago. Maybe it
| works now.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17732912
| slightwinder wrote:
| Dropbox never removed linux-support at all, or sync
| specifically. They removed support for some esoteric
| filesystems which lacked certain features. For most people
| dropbox on linux did not stopped working.
| trevormeier wrote:
| > "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.
| kumarsw wrote:
| 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.
| Seirdy wrote:
| 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.
| copperx wrote:
| 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.
| greyhair wrote:
| It cracks me up that this many years later, you put five
| people in a room to establish a git branch/merge/release
| strategy, and you get five very different opinions, and
| such strong opinions they are.
|
| Luckily, that responsibility is not in my wheelhouse, I
| just have to live with whatever decisions are made.
|
| So yeah, mass adoption in the consumer space, I don't see
| that happening.
|
| A revert or a rebase gone wrong and wails of "what happened
| to my file?"
| jandinter wrote:
| > "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
| willis936 wrote:
| 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.
| koolba wrote:
| 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.
| chubot wrote:
| 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 ...
| nly wrote:
| It works well if the text format in question is line oriented,
| otherwise it doesn't.
| judge2020 wrote:
| > "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.
| dpcan wrote:
| I think my Dropbox is already basically this. It has a revision
| history of my text files I think.
| dpcan wrote:
| 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.
| Matrixik wrote:
| 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
| yarky wrote:
| 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.
| greyhair wrote:
| 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.
| IceWreck wrote:
| Isnt docx binary ? So git is storing a new version of the
| file every commit. That way too much storage space youre
| wasting.
| [deleted]
| testermelon wrote:
| I've heard somewhere that docx is actually gzipped xml. But
| I never really confirmed that myself. But it's binary once
| gzipped, so your point still stands.
| zouhair wrote:
| Juzipped. Just take a docx file and append .zip to it and
| open it.
| simion314 wrote:
| >I've heard somewhere that docx is actually gzipped xml.
| But I never really confirmed that myself.
|
| docx and epub are zip files, you can rename them with a
| .zip at the end and open to see what is inside. It might
| not be as simple to zip them back, at least for epub is
| very important to zip the files in a certain order but I
| forgot the details, but is easy to do from command line.
| bellweather49 wrote:
| Or use Vim; it has built in support for zip files, so you
| can just type something like `vim my_file.docx` and it
| will open the files in netrw (the built in file
| explorer). Move to the file you want and hit enter.
| "word/document.xml" has the main document contents in it.
|
| The xml will probably need to be run through a formatter
| to be readable. You can type `:%!xmllint --format -` if
| you have xmllint installed.
|
| Now prepare to spend several hours trying to make sense
| of the xml. :-p
| simion314 wrote:
| Vim is not for me, I unzip the epub/docx and then open
| the xml/html files in Kate, I had to do this to examine
| what is saved or how it saved or if my custom epub
| exported worked correctly. For epub I think you need to
| make sure the metadata file is the first one in the
| archive for it to work(so not sure if editing stuff
| directly in vim will preserve the order)
| JonathonW wrote:
| Docx (and pptx, and xlsx) is a zipped (not gzipped)
| composite of several XML files plus any other attached
| resources. It extracts out to a whole folder structure.
|
| Definitely binary once compressed, though, and even when
| extracted not an easy format to parse. It might be XML,
| but it's still representing the full complexity of an MS
| Office document.
| [deleted]
| tashbarg wrote:
| Git stores a new file anyways. It's only for packs, that
| delta compression is applied. And delta compression handles
| binary files.
| copperx wrote:
| Doesn't git do binary deltas?
| BerislavLopac wrote:
| That's exactly what the actual git does too.
| newbamboo wrote:
| Powershell can generate and manipulate word docs, as another
| alternative to keeping content in a markdown file.
| TuringTest wrote:
| > 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.
| conductr wrote:
| 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)
| deepGem wrote:
| "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.
| jsnell wrote:
| Have a look at Etherpad.
| ho_schi wrote:
| _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.
| pokstad wrote:
| NB does exactly this: https://github.com/xwmx/nb
| [deleted]
| emptyparadise wrote:
| 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.
| murermader wrote:
| 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.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| 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!
| cobbaut wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| qayxc wrote:
| > Plain text just works, everywhere, all the time.
|
| No it doesn't. Try a plain text description of an
| electronic circuit vs a circuit diagram.
|
| Try a a plain text instruction sheet vs an illustrated one.
|
| Try plain text sheet music vs actual sheet music.
|
| Try a mathematical plot vs plain text tables.
|
| Try concept drawings of product vs text descriptions.
|
| Try construction drawing vs plain text descriptions.
|
| I could go on and on.
|
| Narrow views on the world result in flawed thinking and
| absolutes that are just plain wrong.
| seanw444 wrote:
| This is where Org-mode succeeds over Markdown. Inline
| image support adds a whole new level to plaintext markup.
|
| Sure, you could implement an inline-image-viewing ability
| into your editor for Markdown, too, and I'm sure
| someone's done that for Emacs (maybe it's a default
| feature I haven't enabled), but that's the vanilla
| functionality for Org-mode. Not a secondary-layer
| afterthought.
| lkxijlewlf wrote:
| Plain text can be used to generate those. Anything other
| than plain text is merely a visualization.
| qayxc wrote:
| Which makes you require software again, so what's the
| point exactly?
|
| A cool idea for a logo stored as SVG cannot be visualised
| by a human, neither can text data rows of a CT scan or a
| stress visualisation from an FEM or FEA simulation.
|
| What you call "merely a visualisation" in many cases _is_
| the data you (as a human being) are actually interested
| in; the storage format is an implementation detail and I
| 'm very surprised how this clear distinction seems to be
| ignored by some.
| morganvachon wrote:
| > No it doesn't. Try a plain text description of an
| electronic circuit vs a circuit diagram.
|
| Maybe it's just me, but I do this at work all the time. I
| create build sheets out of just plain text before I fire
| up the circuit simulator, so I've got a good mind map of
| it and something to refer back to. Granted I'm not
| dealing with advanced circuits, it's usually industrial
| machinery and motor control, or at most a simple digital
| timer circuit, but I do just fine with plain text for
| something highly technical.
| the_other wrote:
| Some good points here. In defence of the original point,
| you could extend the "plain text everywhere" to "open
| formats, as text-based as possible" and keep the spirit.
| I'm personally in the "markdown for most things, with
| inline images" camp (with regards my own notes).
|
| This one caught my eye tho:
|
| > Try plain text sheet music vs actual sheet music.
|
| Conceptually, "sheet music" *is* a plain text of music.
|
| I accept that technically it would need to be implemented
| very differently as we haven't got ASCII or UNICODE for
| sheet music (AFAIK). You could probably do it with an XML
| language, or at a stretch YAML, and it'd be close human-
| readable and still vaguely plain text.
| sicariusnoctis wrote:
| > No it doesn't. Try a plain text description of an
| electronic circuit vs a circuit diagram.
|
| I'm not an EE, but there's SPICE for regular electronic
| circuits and SysVerilog et al for logic circuits. Math
| can be typeset in LaTeX, though its plain text
| _readability_ depends on the formula. Category theory
| diagrams can be written in a simple language. Sheet music
| is some sort of XML, though I imagine there could be a
| more human writable /readable plain text format for this
| too. There was also a recent post about Markdown
| diagrams. And of course, code is still entirely text.
|
| Much of what you mentioned can be described in a concise,
| portable text-based language. Though these documents are
| readable as text, they can be further rendered for best
| readability. Luckily, many can also be live previewed.
| qayxc wrote:
| > there's SPICE for regular electronic circuits and
| SysVerilog et al for logic circuits
|
| Both are inputs for programs, not actual representations
| for humans to work with and -understand. Try and design
| or better yet fix _actual_ hardware with a SPICE netlist
| or Verilog program, good luck with that. Different use
| cases require different representations and the world
| doesn 't just consist of software.
|
| > Category theory diagrams can be written in a simple
| language
|
| Category theory diagrams are not curves or function
| plots.
|
| I get the feeling that you are confusing file formats
| with representation. If I need external software to
| actually render the input (which can be binary or text
| for all I care) into a human-readable and -consumable
| format, what good is text?
|
| What's the "readability" of an SVG, LaTex, or worse - MS
| DOCX - document?
|
| How is this: Example netlist v1 1 0
| dc 15 r1 1 0 2.2k r2 1 2 3.3k r3 2
| 0 150 .end
|
| even remotely comparable to this:
| https://sub.allaboutcircuits.com/images/01004.png
|
| And again, I'm not talking about document formats for
| software - I'm talking about data representation for
| humans.
| mro_name wrote:
| I find Edward Tuftes reflections on powerpoint vs.
| engineer-prose very eye-opening.
|
| https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-
| msg?msg_id=...
|
| Prose takes time, contemplation and thought. Leslie Lamport
| says similar.
|
| Helps with understanding however not so much with selling.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| I often see a serial number on a device and take a photo
| rather than typing on a phone keyboard. Or use software
| which blocks clipboard functionality and take a screenshot
| instead of typing it out, yes. OneNote does character
| recognition on all images and makes them searchable. If a
| doorbell or key safe has a keypad and I need my computer to
| look up the code, what difference does it make if the code
| is text or photo of scribble? Because one day my computer
| might forget how to open bitmap files? How likely is that?
| The safe will have turned to dust before all software which
| can read JPGs is lost to history).
|
| > " _Plain text just works, everywhere, all the time._ "
|
| My point is not "text doesn't work", but it would be good
| if other things worked that well and there's no good reason
| why they can't. You don't eat plain oatmeal for every meal
| because it works, and shun restaurants because one day they
| might close. You don't plug your ears because you can read
| lyrics and sheet music and one day you might go deaf. This
| is like the "first class functions" of programming. Wanting
| first class functions is not saying that plain loops don't
| work, it's saying that more powerful things are desirable
| even if they aren't cross-language compatible.
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| What about a note of the dimensions of a room, furniture,
| or piece of equipment? Suddenly you need a diagram.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Obviously not. Nobody is saying that plain text is _never_
| the right solution. Just that it isn 't _always_ the right
| solution.
| Dave3of5 wrote:
| > 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
| smasher164 wrote:
| > 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.
| hkdobrev wrote:
| 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.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| My boss used to write emails in Word and email those as
| attachments.
| hutrdvnj wrote:
| 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.
| agrippanux wrote:
| Somewhat surprised no one has mentioned self hosting NextCloud -
| the Notes feature supports Markdown.
| dm319 wrote:
| Would love a little low-power device with a text display, nice
| keyboard, long battery life and a unix OS for writing.
| peterxpark wrote:
| 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.
| civilized wrote:
| Everyone was talking about Roam for a while, I wonder what
| happened.
| themadturk wrote:
| Roam costs money; Obsidian is free.
| approxim8ion wrote:
| 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.
| wrycoder wrote:
| Maybe they all switched to Obsidian or org mode.
| christophilus wrote:
| > 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.
| jiggunjer wrote:
| I named my folder scribbles. It doubles as a trash bin.
| chronicc wrote:
| 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.
| iszomer wrote:
| 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...
| nivethan wrote:
| 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.
| sebastianconcpt wrote:
| 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
| fallat wrote:
| I do exactly this. http://len.falken.directory
|
| Extremely relevant: http://len.falken.directory/misc/writing-for-
| the-internet-ac...
| eternityforest wrote:
| 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.
| bgro wrote:
| 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.
| inasio wrote:
| 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...
| RBouschery wrote:
| 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..
| nofunsir wrote:
| Ah... good ol' ClarisWorks.
| elteto wrote:
| 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!
| sylens wrote:
| 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.
| awill wrote:
| 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.
| dmje wrote:
| The look of Obsidian put me off too but after I got into it
| I realised the whole theme is totally css-able. It's really
| easy to make it your own.
|
| I do agree though, they do themselves no favours with that
| ugly black / purple website. They need a much better, much
| prettier default.
|
| All that aside, I'm delighted with my switch to Obsidian.
| Just an amazing tool, and total reassurance that it's just
| markdown with all the benefits that brings. So glad to be
| rid of Evernote...!
| D13Fd wrote:
| I use Ulysses too, but I it could be faster. I haven't
| tried them in the latest versions, but in the past I've had
| issues with even medium-sized files with lots of
| formatting.
| nextos wrote:
| 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.
| DerArzt wrote:
| 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.
| rileyphone wrote:
| 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.
| disruptthelaw wrote:
| 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.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| 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.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| 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.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| According to the license, you can't use it commercially
| without the commercial license, and I think the license is
| _very_ clear that work related notes are included in
| commercial definition:
|
| > You need to pay for Obsidian if and only if you use it
| for revenue-generating, work-related activities in a
| company that has two or more people. Get a commercial
| license for each user if that's the case. Non-profit
| organizations do not need commercial licenses.
|
| https://obsidian.md/eula
| pfix wrote:
| But then I consider $50 not that much for a software that
| helps you earning your salary. And it becomes tax
| deductable this way.
|
| If it doesn't help your work or a free markdown editor
| provides you the same value, you have your answer.
|
| As I use it for my job I consider it worth the 50 bucks.
| I still would prefer it to bee FOSS, though (and be
| willing to pay, anyway) - as then I knew even the
| software might be still around when the company behind it
| is gone.
|
| A lot of utility with obsidian comes from the plugins
| from the community (e.g. excalidraw) and even though they
| might store their stuff also on your disk as text files,
| the utility of that eco system is gone as soon as one
| switches (or changes, or requires a different file format
| for the text files or whatnot)
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| Interesting!
| keithnz wrote:
| 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!
| rattray wrote:
| 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.
| ParetoOptimal wrote:
| 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?
| lufasz wrote:
| It's still painfully slow, and the WYSIWYG editing is very
| clunky.
|
| The real time is not as real time as, say, Google Docs.
| There's a lot of lag.
| rattray wrote:
| It's faster now, I haven't been bothered by speed yet.
|
| But yes, realtime collaboration is a critical feature for
| documents that can be used during meetings (and IMO ~no
| meetings should be held without documents).
|
| The other critical feature is comments, which I assume
| Obsidian does not have support for (they would be very
| nontrivial to represent in markdown).
| prashantsengar wrote:
| 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
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| I went to visit https://athensresearch.github.io/athens/
| and got "Only browsers based on Chrome/Chromium are
| supported" on Firefox. Lol.
| D13Fd wrote:
| Wow, iOS Safari gets the same message. Interesting
| choice...
| rattray wrote:
| That doesn't seem designed for growing teams - for example,
| it doesn't seem to have comments.
| prashantsengar wrote:
| They are still in beta currently, focusing on small teams
| right now so there is hope for comments.
| tdhz77 wrote:
| 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
| cytzol wrote:
| 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?
| runjake wrote:
| 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.
| vertis wrote:
| 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.
| kemayo wrote:
| 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.
| ovao wrote:
| Additionally, it's pretty to extend most Markdown parsers
| with extended syntax. The worst thing that happens is you
| have to fork a parser to add extended syntax...which isn't
| so bad.
| merdaverse wrote:
| 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.
| Temporal_Trout wrote:
| 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.
| zonetti wrote:
| 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
| shmerl wrote:
| Easily searchable too.
| usrbinbash wrote:
| Other advantages: They are trivial to compress, and work nice
| with version control.
| lysecret wrote:
| 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.
| fareesh wrote:
| I write markdown via Obsidian and sync it across devices using
| syncthing. Works very well.
| Melatonic wrote:
| Words have meaning
|
| Prose are Powerful
| Jenkins2000 wrote:
| +1 for AsciiDoc https://asciidoctor.org/
| aryamaan wrote:
| 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
| themadturk wrote:
| 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.
| themodelplumber wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| ryanqian wrote:
| Only the formats which used by majority will long live.
| timwis wrote:
| 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.
| Qub3d wrote:
| 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...
| posharma wrote:
| 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?
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| > 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?_
| overeater wrote:
| 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?
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| 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.
| floodyberry- wrote:
| 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?
| jibalt wrote:
| I think "vapid" is generous. The author seems to have no
| grasp of concepts like _encoding_ , _representation_ , and
| _medium_. And the other responses to the critical comment
| (not troll) quite miss the point.
|
| I have a large amount of digitized data, including programs I
| first hand wrote on paper and then transferred to punch
| cards, poems written on paper and later typed in, photographs
| I've scanned, photographs I've taken digital photos of,
| scanned books and articles that contain text in various
| languages along with images, digitized music and videos, etc.
| Some of these consist of "plain" (whatever that means) text
| and some don't. I've been accumulating this data since the
| 1960s. When I think about my collection and the ways I manage
| it, and my knowledge of encodings, representations, and
| media, and then read this article, my most polite response is
| ... smh.
|
| That said, I think there is a valid point in all that
| confusion, and it is stated by several of the comments on the
| article: use Markdown or something similar (but MD is usually
| the best choice) when you can rather than Word or other
| proprietary binary formats. But MD is not "plain" text.
| zepolen wrote:
| I'll give you a 8/10 troll approval rank.
| irrational wrote:
| This is exactly why I love Markdown and why I heartily disagree
| with this guy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30395130
| lngnmn2 wrote:
| 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.
| ricg wrote:
| > _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?
| timwis wrote:
| 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.
| ricg wrote:
| 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...?
| jmmcd wrote:
| 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?
| ricg wrote:
| 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.
| jmmcd wrote:
| Would it be better to have something like a plain text page
| to hold the outline, with links to individual files?
| hprotagonist wrote:
| i tend to make an exception for sqlite, but otherwise i'm much
| the same.
| FpUser wrote:
| I do this forever. I have most o my important docs as a simple
| text files.
| i5heu wrote:
| 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
| blueridge wrote:
| 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
| vishkk wrote:
| Same! And I love it.
| cambrianentropy wrote:
| iA Writer user here too! Was wondering if it would show up.
| westcort wrote:
| 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.
| xixixao wrote:
| 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.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| > 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.
| CA0DA wrote:
| 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.
| sleightofmind wrote:
| 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?
| jeroenhd wrote:
| 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.
| AJayWalker wrote:
| 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.
| Aerroon wrote:
| The difference between markdown and full .txt is minor
| though. You type the same way in both.
| lobocinza wrote:
| 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.
| anamax wrote:
| 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.
| seanw444 wrote:
| [3] Google may decide your data is too scrumptious to _not_
| take a peek, and possibly sell to the highest bidder.
| pradn wrote:
| 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.
| lobocinza wrote:
| Github Flavored Markdown (GFM) is almost a de facto standard
| nowadays.
| andrewclunn wrote:
| 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?
| josephg wrote:
| 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.
| vdqtp3 wrote:
| Until you copy and paste from a website that is using em
| dash, en dash or smart quotes...
| tasha0663 wrote:
| 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.
| tyingq wrote:
| 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.
| hjalmarlucius wrote:
| 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.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Reposting what may be a relevant take on education and using text
|
| https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/joy-text-world-t...
| slmjkdbtl wrote:
| 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?
| revorad wrote:
| 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.
| xenodium wrote:
| For org and iPhone users, I authored https://plainorg.com
|
| https://plainorg.com/#syncing-your-data
| [deleted]
| veidr wrote:
| 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.
| christiangenco wrote:
| 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
| meerita wrote:
| I write a lot of markdown files. Almost all my writings are on
| text plain markdown files.
| revicon wrote:
| 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?
| JonathanBuchh wrote:
| 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/
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| 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?
| mro_name wrote:
| 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?
| cobbaut wrote:
| 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'.
| ysh7 wrote:
| 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.
| sxldier wrote:
| This looks interesting. Thanks for posting!
| appsoftware wrote:
| 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).
| biglost wrote:
| Use directories -- also known as folders.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| 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.
| piyh wrote:
| Vim for phones sounds like trying to play doom on my fridge.
| Possible, not enjoyable.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| I don't mean actual Vim. Vim was designed for efficiency on
| the desktop hardware/software UI; I'm suggesting something
| designed with the same goal for the phone UI, but obviously
| it would work very differently. For example, perhaps it would
| rely heavily on gestures.
| [deleted]
| themadturk wrote:
| 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.
| rpdillon wrote:
| 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.
| syntheweave wrote:
| 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.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Is SVG too complex to be portable across systems and
| preserved across time?
|
| It does remind me that EPUB, the ebook format, has potential:
| It's essentially, as I understand, HTML, CSS, and some
| metadata files, structured according to the specification,
| all in a zip file. It's already a standard, though AFAICT not
| quite stable.
|
| https://www.w3.org/publishing/groups/epub-wg/
| vertis wrote:
| If you've tried opening up lots of epub files (I have),
| you'll soon learn that there are a huge range of layouts
| and ugliness under the hood. Yes it's HTML, and therefore
| you can preserve a good portion of the knowledge even if
| you didn't have an ereader (though you need zip), but it
| would still be a pain to extract and reformat at scale.
|
| Disclaimer: I probably spend too much time thinking about
| this from a 'long now' perspective.
| kromato4 wrote:
| iVim is a very nice port of vim to iOS that is regularly
| updated: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ivim/id1266544660
| lottin wrote:
| 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.
| nxpnsv wrote:
| Last stable release for sc was 19 years ago (according to
| wikipedia). I guess it is perfect already :D
| lottin wrote:
| Yes, it's finished.
| zokier wrote:
| > 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?
| beckingz wrote:
| I really like obsidian for writing text files. Technically
| they're markdown, but I almost never look at them as markdown
| files.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| Wait until this person hears about Markdown.
| account-5 wrote:
| 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.
| urlwolf wrote:
| 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.
| account-5 wrote:
| 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.
| thenerdhead wrote:
| I always fall prey to popular knowledge management apps or fads.
| And I still somehow come right on back to .txt files.
| _carbyau_ wrote:
| 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.
| Aerroon wrote:
| 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.
| sgallant wrote:
| 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).
| jbc1 wrote:
| Do you find text files to otherwise be difficult to search?
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| 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).
| awill wrote:
| 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.
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| You won't be able to.
|
| See if you'd like Joplin or Simplenote. I still use
| Simplenote. Because even though FSNotes seems promising,
| it's still not there.
| awill wrote:
| but both of them store notes in a proprietary way, so if
| they shut down (or I just wanted to move), wouldn't it be
| harder to migrate off?
| gotorazor wrote:
| 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?
| paxys wrote:
| Plain text doesn't have to mean ASCII. Every major OS/text
| editor supports UTF-8.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| 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 :)
| AlanYx wrote:
| In French, there are various conventions around quotation
| marks ("guillemets") that may involve inserting non-breaking
| spaces (ideally, a NARROW NO-BREAK SPACE), depending on your
| workflow.
| analog31 wrote:
| 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.
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