Use Plain-text

Tags: writing 

Contents

Introduction

Plain text formats like Markdown, AsciiDoc, and TeX are great for documentation, technical writing, and note-taking.

The Lindy Effect

Plain text has been around since the dawn of time (advent of computing), and will remain accessible for an eternity (not exaggerating at all).

There exists an interesting phenomenon known as The Lindy Effect (or Lindy’s Law) that theorizes - a technology or an idea has a life-expectancy proportional to its current age.

For e.g., a 20 year old piece of software will remain relevant for 20 more years in the future, whereas a technology of three years might become obsolete within the next three.

Why plain text?

  • Timeless.
  • Independent of any platform, OS, device or program unlike closed source writing ecosystems.
  • Sync files locally with tools like rsync or Syncthing, etc.
  • Serve files locally with a simple python server.
  • Use version control tools like git to keep a history of changes you make.
  • Focus on writing instead of wasting time styling and formatting documents unlike rich text formats (HTML and Word documents).
  • Search and manipulate files with commandline tools like Awk, Grep, sed, or other modern alternatives.
  • Convert to any other required formats (PDF, EPUB, HTML, CSV, etc.,) with tools like Pandoc.
  • Use static site generators to create websites from your plain text files. A few of the popular services include Hugo, Jekyll, and Astro - which I use for some of my websites, including this.
  • Write shell scripts to simplify and automate your work flow.

Conclusion

I have several shell scripts to take notes, write journals, log data, manage bookmarks and cheat-sheets, and a lot more to simplify my workflow with plain text.

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