How to live your life in text files

[rcjordan]

See Spotlight section...

https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/18/24075077/bose-ultra-open-superlist-bulletin-text-files-note-apps-installer

Why all your notes and files should be plain text - The Verge

[Brad]

There was a lot of discussion about text files back in the early ebook days (Palm PDA's) where every software ebook reader had a different file format.  Anyway the guy who founded Project Gutenberg was a big advocate of using text files for archival purposes and for ebooks.  Which is to say, the conclusion has not changed: text is still best.

Heck there are a lot of web pages that would be better off as just plain text or really basic HTML and Times New Roman on a white background without all the JS horsepucky.

[rcjordan]

That article pretty much outlines my tech lifestyle.

I recommend Saved.io for bookmark hoarding though.

BTW, I'm back on Win now so I can dig out the executable for UltraEdit ver 6 --the supreme text editor, IMO.  Its column mode and F&R are the best.

[ergophobe]

I kept all my dissertation items as plain text and then, over my subsequent career, converted anything that was not plain text to plain text (like a book manuscript, minus the footnotes, though I could also dump those).

Then I kept them in a directory tree. Thousands of pages. Probably 6000 pages by the end of my career. Then I could fire up Powergrep and blaze through those files in seconds. People would often marvel at my "memory" because I could locate almost any passage they were looking for.

I found having a programming background surprisingly useful as a historian.  I never met another historian who knew what a regex was until I started teaching my students. In commemoration of just how useful it is, there is a 3-year-old steeper named Regex living im Florida in the family farm of one of my former students.

Plus, of course, as our layout tool changed from WordPerfext to Word to InDesign, these files were already "converted".

Plain text rules.

I keep Notepad++ open all the time. If I have a new topic, I just open a new tab. Since it auto saves, I don't even name the files or save them until the notes appear to have long-term utility. In the meantime, they're just there in a tab anytime I start up Notepad++

[ergophobe]

Typora looks interesting - sort of a middle ground. By using MD you can get some formatting, but the underlying file is still uncompressed plain text.

Formatting makes regex searches more complicated though.

[rcjordan]

>Notepad

Firefox will remember open tabs, so I keep the old text editor bookmarklet pinned far to the left.  Great for working notes or memory joggers but also great for constructing search terms that are going to require repeated tweaking of kw & syntax

Code Select Expand


data:text/html, <style>html,body{margin: 0; padding: 0;}</style><textarea style="font-size: 1.5em; line-height: 1.5em; background: white; color: black; width: 100%; height: 100%; border: none; outline: none; margin: 0; padding: 90px;" autofocus placeholder="SCRATCHPAD: Content evaporates on reload|close..." />


[grnidone]

I use BBEdit on the Mac, and I love it. It has a programmer setting that will number each line and shade every other. It's wonderful.

[rcjordan]

I have moved back to Windows (11) and -just yesterday- resurrected UltraEdit v6.  I never could find a linux or chrome editor that could match all the features of UE6. Column mode wasn't the only feature I missed. F&R of tabs, line breaks, bol and eol markers ...the list goes on.

I'd saved a dozen or so .exe's over the years. Sketchup 8 was another one I needed to port over to a new machine before the old laptop died.  All in all, I ended up with 4 new apps in the taskbar.

[rcjordan]

quick read. good summation...

https://sive.rs/plaintext

Write plain text files | Derek Sivers

[ergophobe]

I've heard him say that on podcasts. It's a good argument. I don't think I could possibly even access my Master's thesis.

It was always the footnotes that kept me from going plain text for a lot of things. There are some things that are hard to do well in plain text.

There are format-rich "plain text" formats though like RTF, which has all the formatting you could want, but you can also open up the file in any text editor and read it and, if need be, extract what you want with a series of regex search and replace.

[rcjordan]

Decades ago there was a study on accounting record-keeping.  They found that most software and hardware in use changed within a few years and people & businesses could no longer access digital archives from a few years earlier when audited.   

[ergophobe]

Adobe does this on purpose. Files created in InDesign or Illustrator more than two versions ago cannot be opened last I checked.

Rather than "always use plain text" which isn't practical in many situations, I would advocate, "always use open formats."

All my accounting is in spreadsheets. The formulas might not transfer from one program to another, but I can always export CSV files and import them and I suspect that, like a "plain text" file, will work until EOL (meaning my EOL, not the software).