When you have an iPhone, even text files feel like a custom proprietary format that is silo’d in its own world.
My problem is that while vim, markdown to HTML, and headless browser printing to PDF all work great on my desktop Linux machine there isn’t really a way to translate this to iOS and back.
If I could (a) mount my iCloud Drive in my Linux machine and (b) have a markdown centric editor on my phone then it would all work nicely. Unfortunately I feel like the lure of commercial success means Apple won’t allow the former and anyone working on the latter is doing it as a closed, proprietary, commercial system.
I curse myself every day for mixing operating systems!
I use Obsidian myself, which simply stores text in Markdown files. It essentially shares all the pros of plain text: it'll be readable in the future, I'm not stuck with a single platform, I can sync and sort them into directories.
I rebuild my timeline thing to use files as the database instead of PostgreSQL.
Having everything as CSV, markdown, GPX etc means that I can use all the excellent software in the world to manipulate data... Or just a text editor. It's a lot easier than writing my own software to manipulate my own database.
It also means that my data will outlive my software without any effort.
And it means that backups are handled by my existing backup software.
I also moved my website to a static site generator earlier. Same reasons. I edit that website for a living, and using Sublime Text instead of a CMS WYSIWYG editor sped up my work dramatically. I can't overstate how much better it made batch edits.
Plain text is the hacker's file format.
You can jot down ideas every day in markdown somewhere, maybe in a daily journal that's part of your second brain. Then you can move them into documents in a Git repo. Then you can feed them into an LLM and start producing interesting functions for your personal utility library. Then you can string them into a software solution for one problem or another.
This probably sounds vaguely disturbing if you are wearing a software engineer's hat. But if you're wearing a hacker's hat it's nirvana. At no point do you have to worry about being bound by the limitations of a particular tool, you are just transforming one chunk of text into another and moving those chunks around, really.
Previously on HN: 11 months ago [1] (14 points, 4 comments) 2 years ago [0] (739 points, 412 comments)
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30521545 [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36591494
What is a good way to edit plain text files on a phone?
Do iOS and Android ship the tools to open/edit/save plain text files these days?
Edit: My question is not about third party apps. It is about what ships with iOS and plain Android.
I use Markdown a lot, but for casual everyday stuff... I really like having sync. Keep opens instantly, has Android widgets(Less important now that Google Tasks has taken over some of what I used to do with Keep), and fast search.
But if I'm doing a Real Project, Markdown files in a git repo are perfect.
Luckily it's very easy to just copy from Keep to plan text.
My only problem with all thing plain text is I need cross-platform sync cuz I write on both my phone and laptop. For these I use Simplenote which has served me super well, but still looking for solutions where I can actually write plain text "files" while have convenient syncing.
Related (in my mind, at least):
Notebooks without lines are the plain text files of the analogue world.
No lines to dictate how and what you want to write or draw.
I do the same in org-mode, simply because pure-textual access (like grep) it's nice but limited, clickable links, attachments, executable links (elisp: but also various over link types like notmuch: for mail) are really a thing.
The issue it's that they are desktop-bound, no matter what you do. You can also run Emacs on Android but such platforms are meant just to consume content and munge data from users, not to produce, so it's not a matter of UI or mere bits availability. For sharing there are a bit of limitations but that's still easy if needed.
Beside that the most IT-frustration is the current state of development done to suck out all power to the user: we have IPv6 since decades, oh yes it's not perfect, but we perfectly can have a global per device and we can buy personal domain names and have subdomains on them. Unfortunately even if NOT having that is hyper-costly and challenging (NAT just to say) that's not there. FLOSS available to uncomfortable self-host is damn limited, we miss things like:
- damn simple desktop screen sharing NO THIRD PARTY, no need for special configs, not need to circumvent NAT and so on
- damn simple VoIP with or without video, P2P or with a personal server, but one, not to be configured with a gazzilion of things (yes we have GNU SIPWitch, Mumble, but still they are not a thing you deploy in a snap)
- damn simple internet-wide file sharing (we have gazillion of options, none simple and effective)
From a technological standpoint, those are perfectly possible, not done because "we need to been able to surveil users", "nobody is interested" (blatantly false, seen the popularity of crappy surveilling proprietary services we all know) and so on.
Long story short: yes we can do some thing to use computers effectively, taking notes is a good example, but we potentially can do MUCH MUCH MUCH more and we could not because of some "interests". That's a real shame simply because we lose decades of evolution and we only have one life, no respawn in the IRL game.
So step one is "be American so everything you want to write fits in American Standard Code for Information Interchange"?
> Every device, including ones long gone, and ones not invented yet, can read and edit plain text. [...] But plain text? Always. Everywhere.
Somebody needs to watch "Plain Text" (Dylan Beattie, NDC Copenhagen 2022) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gd5uJ7Nlvvo
For example, have fun with ISO 8859-2 vs. Windows 1250. And add Windows 1252 for giggles. And for the ASCII-only persons: there still is EBCDIC.