On Plain Text

Series: Notes on Tools

Author: Pat Ambrosio

tags: meta writing

Plain text outlives its tools. A markdown file written today opens in vi, in an editor that does not exist yet, and in whatever replaces both.

What survives

Some things that survive in plain text:

1. The words themselves
2. Structure — headings, lists, emphasis
3. Links, as long as the far end holds up

Some things that do not:

• Layout that depended on a specific renderer
• Anything stored only in a proprietary database
• Formatting applied by clicking buttons

The trade

You give up the immediate feedback of a visual editor and get durability in exchange. For a blog that mostly holds notes, that is a good trade¹.

The best format is the one you can still read in twenty years. — nobody in particular, but it holds up

There is a real cost to this, and it is worth being honest about it: you will spend time on snake_case_filenames and fiddly escaping that a WYSIWYG editor would have handled. Whether that is worth it depends on how long you expect the writing to matter(p. 12, 1).

A comparison

Doing it

The whole pipeline for this site is four steps, and you can read all of it:

# find the posts, render each, fill a template, write the output
for f in *.md; do
  "$MARKDOWN_COMMAND" "$f" > rendered.html
done

Nothing here is novel. It is worth restating anyway, because the pull toward heavier tooling is constant and mostly unexamined. See the jenny README for how little is actually required.

• 1: A trade, not a free win. Ask anyone who has hand-escaped a table. ↩︎