Plain text has been around for decades and it’s here to stay

> Fun to see a contemporary take on something that peaked between 1970s–1980s

Maybe that was the peak, but you had some very good TUIs in the early 1990's for DOS apps, where Windows hadn't quite completely taken over yet, but you very likely had a VGA-compatible graphics card and monitor, meaning you had a good, high-resolution, crisp and configurable-font text mode available, and also likely had a mouse. This is the stuff I grew up with: QBASIC and EDIT.COM for example. Bisqwit has a cool video about how some apps from that era could have a proper mouse cursor, even: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nlNQcKsj74

Couldn't help riffing off on a tangent from the title (since the article is about diagramming tools)...

Dylan Beattie has a thought-provoking presentation for anyone who believes that "plain text" is a simple / solid substrate for computing: "There's no such thing as plain text" https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/theres-no-such-thing-as... (you'll find many videos from different conferences)

Tangent to article: text character based charts for statistics. Decades ago I had an education version of MINITAB that ran under DOS and did scatter diagrams and dotplots and box and whisker plots from text characters (you could use pure text, I think proper ASCII or you could set an option to use those DOS drawing characters). The idea was to encourage initial data exploration before launching on formal statistical tests.

Anyone know of a terminal program that can do proper dotplots?

Also: M-x artist-mode in emacs.

The list at the top could be longer:

- https://asciiflow.com/

- https://asciidraw.github.io/

Anybody know more?

Plain text is great as far as it goes, but when it comes to structure you start from zero for every file. There’s always someone getting wistful about ad-hoc combinations of venerable Unix tools to process “plain text”, and that’s fine when you’re in an ad-hoc situation, but it’s no substitute for a well-specified format.

From the title, I was not expecting a bunch of extended ASCII characters.

Plain text is great, but if you're holding a hammer ...

I have a mixed opinion of unicode, but it's hard not to love the box-drawing / block-element chars.

Unsung is one of the best little blogs around. Well worth checking out the rest of the posts.

I'm all for it, but it's dangerously mixing ASCII with the meaning of plain-text...

It's good to see the plain text, it's been a while that people wanting them.

So many users wants the Special fonts but in here simple is Special to eyes and Mind.

As a developer I agree. Sometimes simplicity is more Special and powerful than complex formats.

Text and text files are simple. I think this is their number #1 advantage.

There are limitations though. Compare a database of .yml files to a database in a DBMS. I wrote a custom forum via ruby + yaml files. It also works. It also can not compete anywhere with e. g. rails/activerecord and so forth. Its sole advantage is simplicity. Everywhere else it loses without even a fight.

All plaintext bullshit should be eradicated. Fucking useless as a medium when displaying and handling complex tasks.

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Plain text keeps winning not because it’s perfect, but because it’s the lowest common denominator that never dies — everything else eventually breaks, changes, or gets abandoned. The funny part is people argue about encodings and structure, but in practice UTF-8 + a bit of convention (Markdown, JSON, etc.) has already become the “good enough standard.”

Curious though — do you think the real limit of plain text is readability at scale (like configs turning messy), or is it more about lack of enforced structure compared to proper systems?