Why plain text?
Ellane, writing at PTPL 192, explains how and why she lives the plain text life and invites others to do the same. She even provided the questions. Thanks, Ellane.
- When did you start using plain text?
- I don’t remember just when I began moving to plain text, but it was sometime in the late 1990s. That’s when I first dipped my toe into running linux; a friend helped me set it up on an old computer so that I could use it as a primitive home server.
- Why did you start using plain text?
- The primary motivation was that I was writing what we now call a blog that was published using a rather primitive system that could accommodate only plain text; I gradually began using it more broadly. I lived in two worlds for a couple of decades – I had to stay with the standard word processors alongside plain text before I retired so that I could collaborate with colleagues who were firmly in the proprietary software world. Over time, I discovered ways to migrate both ways between plain text and those other formats.
- What do you use plain text for?
- Almost all of my computer work: writing (including journeling and blogging), money management, calendaring, task management.
- While I was still teaching, I graded and commented on student papers in plain text, exporting my comments to (via LaTeX) pdfs that I gave to students
- What keeps you using plain text?
- Nothing much original to say here – the portability of my data, the cleanness of the look, the security of knowing that I’ll continue being able to access data even as the technology changes, the ease of version control that allows me to track what I’m doing from day to day (and undo what I decide shouldn’t have been done (!), even while keeping the abandoned path just in case I want to look at it again).
- Do you use any markup or formatting languages? If so, which ones and why?
- I live in emacs generally and, for the most part, org-mode in particular.
- What are your favourite plain text tools or applications?
- Is there one tool you can’t do without?
- Emacs (org-mode). (I should say that I don’t have a dog in the emacs/vim/etc religion wars. I use emacs only because the friend who facilitated my move into linux and plain text years ago used emacs.)
- Is there anything you can’t do with plain text?
- I use two non-plain text programs
- Proton for email. (I compromise here a bit, running proton mail bridge so that I have access to messages locally and can search them using notmuch. But I handle regular reading and writing of emails in the proton app. I ran a local mail server and handled email within emacs for a while but that got too challenging for my somewhat limited tech skills)
- Once a year, TurboTax. This one grates on me, but it’s either that or pay someone to do our tax return for us.
- I use two non-plain text programs
