Plain text has been around for decades and it’s here to stay(unsung.aresluna.org)
98 pointsby rbanffy9 hours ago14 comments
  • 2b3a5117 minutes ago
    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?

  • ssivark6 hours ago
    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)

    • rmunn2 hours ago
      Haven't watched the videos yet, but from the slides, it looks like part of the issue he was talking about was encodings (there's a slide illustrating UTF-16LE ve UTF-16BE, for example). Thankfully, with UTF-8 becoming the default everywhere (so that you need a really good reason not to use it for any given document), we're back at "yes, there is such a thing as plain text" again. It has a much larger set of valid characters, but if you receive a text file without knowing its encoding, you can just assume it's UTF-8 and have a 99.7% chance of being right.

      FINALLY.

    • lelanthran4 minutes ago
      I can't tell what the argument is just from the slideshow. The main point appears to be that code pages, UTF-16, etc are all "plain text" but not really.

      If that really was the argument, then it is, in 2026, obsolete; utf-8 is everywhere.

  • dwban hour ago
    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.
    • adityaathalyean hour ago
      XML, JSON, YAML, RDF, EDN, LaTeX, OrgMode, Markdown... Plenty of plaintext, but structured information formats that are "yes, and". Yes, I can process them as lines of plain text, and I can do structured data transformations on them too, and there are clients (or readers) that know how to render them in WYSIWYG style.
      • dwb35 minutes ago
        If that’s our definition of “plain text”, sure. I would still rather our tools were more advanced, such that printable and non-printable formats were on a more equal footing, though. I always process structured formats through something that understands the structure, if I can, so I feel that the only benefit I regularly get out of formats being printable is that I have to use tools that only cope with printable formats. The argument starts getting a bit circular for me.
  • draven2 hours ago
    Also: M-x artist-mode in emacs.
  • suprjami5 hours ago
    The list at the top could be longer:

    - https://asciiflow.com/

    - https://asciidraw.github.io/

    Anybody know more?

  • Joel11an hour ago
    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.

  • dlcarrier5 hours ago
    From the title, I was not expecting a bunch of extended ASCII characters.
    • Freak_NL3 hours ago
      The article mentioned that the use of 'ASCII' within the context of those tools should not be seen as the limited character set ASCII. Personally, I would avoid mentioning ASCII at all.

      The title just talks of plain text though, and plain text usually means UTF-8 encoded text these days. Plain, as in conventional, standardised, portable, and editable with any text editor. I would be surprised if someone talked about plain text as being limited to just ASCII.

  • keyle2 hours ago
    I'm all for it, but it's dangerously mixing ASCII with the meaning of plain-text...
  • OuterVale6 hours ago
    Unsung is one of the best little blogs around. Well worth checking out the rest of the posts.
  • nullhole5 hours ago
    I have a mixed opinion of unicode, but it's hard not to love the box-drawing / block-element chars.
  • shevy-java2 hours ago
    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.

  • 6 hours ago
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  • alex1sa32 minutes ago
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  • edelkas7 hours ago
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