Do you need big, feature-packed, and sometimes complex tool for your work, to stay organized, or keep track of your tasks?
Maybe not.
Maybe all you need is plain text. Yes, simple, old fashioned, unadorned, boring text. It sounds scary or alien, but it’s not.
I use plain text for my notes and keeping track of my work orders. Entering deadlines and related information in calendar applications is a fiddly, time-consuming nightmare, and I find it much easier to just jot down the date, time, and related information in plain text, ordered by date and time.
Works fine. I do it all the time and have done since the late 80’s.
Another good one is to “cat $HOME/txt/announce.txt” at the end of my .profile so I can see what’s coming up. Eg at login, the last thing I see is:
Upcoming Appointments:
=================================================================
06-DEC-2019-1930-Christmas Drinks next door with neighbors.
[…snip!..]
07-DEC-2019-1100-Eye check with “Margaret”.
22-MAY-2020-0000-Trailer registration.
=================================================================
cerberus:/mnt/nfs/home/uridium%
Always love it when some guy thinks the whole world speaks jargon. The irony here is that most (if not all) who actually knows what “plain text” is and why isn’t whatever they’re using “plain text” are probably using “plain text” or have considered using it.
That whole statement reminds me of the single use plastic bag debate.
As with everything in life, there is not a single solution for everything. I never believed the saying that “real programmers use vi” or something similar. Every person works differently, so maybe one person works great on vi, but another works a lot better on an IDE. I myself, prefer the second option
A bit hypocritical using html to extol the virtues of text. Commit 100% or I’m not convinced.
Read more articles. He is a terrible plain text advocate. His definition of “plain text” also includes markdown and html, and any other thing that can be done in notepad.exe including scripts. Its so broad as to be worthless of a definition. I mean I can create images in a text editor, does that make them plain text? Really not sure what he’s even advocating for. Maybe he just doesn’t like using easy to use software to make things, and just likes using notepad?
Bill Shooter of Bul,
Wait till he discovers spreadsheets, haha.
I *think* his motivation stems from the lack of consistency in accessibility functionality across tools, which I can appreciate. It seems like he has one tool that works the way he likes and he’s trying to use it everywhere. If it works for him, great. The key here is understanding that the best tool for the job isn’t necessarily the same for everyone. To take franksands’ example, for some people a text editor with accessibility features may much be better than an IDE without them, however for other people the IDE can nevertheless be more productive for them.
The author is attempting to make the case that text is enough for everyone because it’s best for him, but to be honest that’s a tough sell. I’m not sure he would acknowledge a simple truth: a simple text editor genuinely is not the best tool for everyone.
Markdown IS a good example of the power of plain text. It is very easy for humans to consume and provides multiple layers of potential enhancement. For example a simple text editor can apply some of the formatting directives as you write, and then there’s of course the fully rendered version.
But you absolutely can use MD as a guideline to providing sensible structuring to your plain text documents without any intention to view the “compiled” document.
Personally I’ve been using MD for a while for documenting about just anything and everything due to its flexible nature.
sj87,
It’s a fact that you can represent almost anything in text, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that it’s the most useful representation to work with. For example, I’d rather use more specialized tools to make a presentation. Sure that could be done in plain text, but it would be neither the most efficient nor the most expressive medium to work in. By the same token I’ll instantly throw text markup out the window when working with svg files, I’ll take inkscape every time. Technically I could replace my databases and spreadsheets with text files. I work on lots of data in json and xml files, which are text markup languages after all, but more often than not one of the first goals of a project is to import these data feeds into a more suitable medium for high level manipulations and analysis. Despite the simplicity of text, sometimes high level tools do the job way better than text editors can.
Don’t get me wrong here, text editing along with markup has a time and place. I use text markup myself especially for adhoc textual data representation. But it still needs to be balanced against the productivity, organizational, and analytical benefits of higher level software. Chances are high that text files can technically represent the data , but if you’re working with lots of data records a text editor is not going to be a very efficient way to work with it and will likely be a step backwards versus a higher level abstraction.
IMHO the author seems to lack a rounded perspective, though to be fair I shouldn’t fault him for that given that he’s coming at it from the “accessibility” angle, which isn’t something I deal with a lot. If high level applications don’t work with his screen reader, and most probably don’t, then they are 100% useless to him. In those terms, it completely makes sense that he would dismiss them outright.
Now you are intentionally misrepresenting the problem at hand and that makes this another strawman, even if I hate to repeat myself.
For starters SVG isn’t even a format designed for storing prose, i.e. large amounts of written text for human consumption. It is about displaying pictures, actually.
sj87,
The problem is that the author is not precise on the scope of what he means when he says plain text is all you need. He left it open ended, therefor the criticism is not a strawman but rather a counterexample. If he were to explicitly clarify the scope to be written prose, then I’d be more likely to agree with him. I’ll concede maybe that’s what he meant, but that’s not quite what he said in any clear way.
Nevertheless you can take his own examples (which I also did in my earlier post) where he states that powerpoint & OO impress are overkill, suggesting HTML and javascript to take their place.
https://plaintextproject.online/2019/09/04/slides.html
I’m a web developer, and I think powerpoint is the easier/faster tool for making presentations than manually crafting HTML and messing with CSS. I think if we’re honest with ourselves, the whole WYSIWYG is a major productivity boost for something like powerpoint especially for a normal user.
I’m not certain of his underlying motivation for promoting “plaintext” (or rather markup) in place of more advanced tools. He doesn’t explicitly state the “why”, only the “how”. Based on context, I’m left to infer it stems from accessibility concerns, but that’s just a guess.
Edit:
I found this link, but it’s still unclear to me why he expects a normal user to care.
https://plaintextproject.online/2017/07/11/matters.html
Markdown is not plain text, IMHO. its formatted text.
But maybe that’s his pitch: Text based formatting systems are good, rather than those that are not human readable. In which case I would agree, but still object to deeming all of these “Plain Text”
But there is a slippery slope.
XML is human and machine readable. Some more human readable than others.
PERL is theoretically human readable.
Regular expressions are theoretically human readable
Now you’re just strawmanning. By your definition any attempt at bringing structure to plain text makes it “formatted text”. Sure, if you want to define it that way, but this discussion is not about labels, it is about what can be achieved in a meaningful way by using a simple *non-formatting* text editor.
(Emphasis on the basis to prove your definition of formatted text completely bonkers.)
sj87 No, thats how I really feel about it. I don’t consider markdown plain text, no more than I consider rich text plain text. Its just not.
Indeed… they could have at least made it CSS only and JS free….
He has chosen an horrible example: work orders. It’s much simpler using a spreadsheet. Well, csv files are plain text but I think he is talking about using a text editor for everything.
I do yearn for the day when everyone used plain texts for emails. This HTML garbage for email has got to go! Damn kids, get off my lawn!
leech,
How far back? Before HTML most clients supported microsoft’s rich text format in the 90s.
Sometimes I use HTML, but for the most part I don’t need it as long as I can attach files.
Plain text email was generally ok, but the lack of a “block quote” mechanism lead to some lousy quoted text wrapping back in the day. That’s one advantage for markup that would be lost with pure plaintext.
I once had someone complain that the > looked terrible and was misunderstood and that I should change it on my one server, even though it is pretty universal for plain text emails to use to signify that it’s the quoted post.
Word wrap still is an issue, even with mark up. I long ago came to the conclusion that all email clients are garbage, it just depends on the level of garbage you’re willing to put up with.
Also fun side note, apparently if you want the ‘black’ theme for outlook, you must be a full subscriber to Office365. No idea why they made that one of the ‘perks’….
leech,
How so? I’m looking through the HTML emails in my mail box and they’re all responsive, just like web pages. Even recursively quoted text wraps correctly.
That’s something that used to be problematic with plaintext emails and “>” quotes applied to fixed line lengths, but I really haven’t seen that in a long time as most clients support HTML quoting now days.
Are you referring to some buggy HTML email client?
I still prefer local fat apps to web clients and personally use thunderbird, but the rise of google web apps in particular has strangled the market for fat apps. The remaining development resources are anemic. Thunderbird has known bugs at least a decade old. Sometimes the maintainer acknowledges them, but development has mostly stalled once mozilla decided that thunderbird has no business value to them and cut them off.
https://techcrunch.com/2015/11/30/thunderbird-flies-away-from-mozilla/
They never found a new home and I think there’s one maintainer still employed by mozilla. I haven’t found a pressing reason to switch, but I could look into kmail and evolution, assuming those support webdav calendars.
I did a little research.
Evolution apparently doesn’t have full support for caldav (can read but not write).
https://help.gnome.org/users/evolution/stable/calendar-webdav.html.en
KDE Kontact apparently can write to caldav but has bugs reading from it.
https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?t=126268
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=325224
I’d be in a bind if I lost thunderbird
Every so often, I look around and remember the world is a magical and wonderful place that is wasted on and ruined by other people.
Yep. It’s pretty amazing, and it’s definitely a triumph of humanity that we, as a species, can produce such crap for something so old and as widely used as email.