- Dec 2023
-
en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
-
Wikipedia, Text file, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_file?useskin=vector
-
- Oct 2023
-
research.swtch.com research.swtch.com
-
the modern textual archive format
The
ar
format is underrated.
Tags
Annotators
URL
-
- Aug 2022
-
docs.nginx.com docs.nginx.com
-
Process the log file to determine the spread of data: cat /tmp/sslparams.log | cut -d ' ' -f 2,2 | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | perl -ane 'printf "%30s %s\n", $F[1], "="x$F[0];'
-
- Apr 2021
-
www.infoworld.com www.infoworld.com
-
Ideally, GitHub would understand rich formats
I've advocated for a different approach.
Most of these "rich formats" are, let's just be honest, Microsoft Office file formats that people aren't willing to give up. But these aren't binary formats through-and-through; the OOXML formats are ZIP archives (following Microsoft's "Open Packaging Conventions") that when extracted are still almost entirely simple "files containing lines of text".
So rather than committing your "final-draft.docx", "for-print.oxps" and what-have-you to the repo, run them through a ZIP extractor then commit that to the repo. Then, just like any other source code repo, include a "build script" for these—which just zips them back up and gives them the appropriate file extension.
(I have found through experimentation that some of these packages do include some binary files (which I can't recall offhand), but they tend to be small, and you can always come up with a text-based serialization for them, and then rework your build script so it's able to go from that serialization format to the correct binary before zipping everything up.)
-
- Dec 2019
-
swiftodoapp.com swiftodoapp.com
-
Your task list is a plain text file, not some proprietary format owned by a company or locked to a specific application.
-
-
plaintext-productivity.net plaintext-productivity.net
-
In this system, plaintext files are used for most of the backbone of your organizational system.
-
-
-
You're not going to find many checkboxes, drop-downs, reminders, or date pickers here.
Thankfully, some clients like https://github.com/QTodoTxt/QTodoTxt2 do have nice features like autocomplete, and date pickers.
-
Countless productivity apps and sites store your tasks in their own proprietary database and file format. But you can work with your todo.txt file in every text editor ever made, regardless of operating system or vendor.
-
-
burnsoftware.wordpress.com burnsoftware.wordpress.com
-
Future proofs your journal entries by saving them as plain text and organizing them as you go. This means you can read or create entries when you don’t have DayJournal.
-
-
www.howtogeek.com www.howtogeek.com
-
It’s flexible in precisely the way so many modern apps aren’t, and if you like tweaking things until they’re just right, I can’t recommend it enough.
-
And if all else fails, you can just use a text editor.
-
-
github.com github.com
-
Plain text is software and operating system agnostic. It's searchable, portable, lightweight, and easily manipulated. It's unstructured. It works when someone else's web server is down or your Outlook .PST file is corrupt. There's no exporting and importing, no databases or tags or flags or stars or prioritizing or insert company name here-induced rules on what you can and can't do with it.
-
-
zapier.com zapier.com
-
Most to-do lists give you no control over your data. Your tasks live inside the app, not in a document you can edit, and syncing is handled by whichever company made the app. If you don't like this, todo.txt is a great alternative.
-