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The Eight Plain Text Questions

Based off Ellane W's based off Scott Nesbit's Eight questions for Donald Brown

Tags: fun, website, meta

Based off Ellane W’s based off Scott Nesbit’s Eight questions for Donald Brown.

When did you start using plain text?

High school, around 2016.

Why did you start using plain text?

I had seen a couple videos at the time about Linux, and about a week later I had been given a laptop. Like many experts in their field, I am acutely aware of all the ways in which the systems I work with can run optimally and how easily they can also break. Many software developers know and strive towards having resilient systems, built in the most elegant way possible. I used to take notes by hand in notebooks, and computers seemed very interesting to me back then. Because of this, I had a series of requirements which my writing system had to meet:

For notetaking, this left me with only a few options. Those being:

Because of the flaky electrical service in Puerto Rico, I couldn’t use anything that relied on a stable internet connection. This discarded most of the options here and left me with either Microslop word or plain text. Once I got rid of Windows in favor of Linux, I was forced to use plain text.

What do you use plain text for?

I use plain text for tracking my projects. (Soon, I’ll unveil my collection of projects.[1]) My method for keeping track of projects is to have a prepend-only log of what I do every time that I work on it. I make sure to write what I just did and the reasons why I did those things, and the considerations that were taken in the decisions that were made. I finish each daily log with an “Immediate next steps” section so that I can continue the project right where I left it off the next time I need/want to work on it.

What keeps you using plain text?

I call it plain text but in reality, I use different languages depending on what I want to do. I feel like this is the fairest way to go about this: you use a programming language purposefully designed for the thing you want to do. In this case, when I want to track projects or write content for my website I use markdown. When I’m writing more professional works I use typst or $\LaTeX$. BTW I also consider programming languages that awer compiled from plain text files to also be plain text. (anything with the text/plain mime-type; hence the tag I use for my plain-text series)

Do you use any markup or formatting languages? If so, which ones and why?

I use LanguageTool for spellchecking, hugo’s templates for special shortcodes like epigraphs. For example,

{{< epigraph pre="Mario G. Harmon" >}}
    Everything happens for a reason.
    Sometimes the reason is you're stupid and make bad decisions.
{{</ epigraph >}}

Everything happens for a reason.
Sometimes the reason is you're stupid and make bad decisions.
— Mario G. Harmon

I also use obsidian to look at links between my notes. This has served useful in cases when I know that something I want to blog about is just a matter of stitching together several notes. For example, A Monad is not a Burrito.

What are your favourite plain text tools or applications?

If we’re talking about tools, not in order of preference:

Is there one tool you can’t do without?

A text editor: vim. Without it, I wouldn’t be able to edit anything and nothing would ever get made. Me without vim is like a painter without a brush, or a carpenter without a hammer; sure I can just head and tail with a printf in between in order to edit text in files. I suppose I could even use ed (pronounced as individual letters: Where GREP Came From) to edit files. But, vim is my editor of choice.

Is there anything you can’t do with plain text?

Visualizations!

I like being able to visualize data. As I said previously, whenever I’m writing more professional work I use typesetting programs. Well, when I take class notes, I like using plain text. Obsidian supports rendering content inside $ $ as $\LaTeX$ math code so that’s what I do for my most of my classes.