I still use plain text for everything. (2016)

Re:I still use plain text for everything. (2016) by genjipress on Tuesday June 29, 2021 @02:20PM (#27679706)

I built myself a little note-taking / wiki app that uses Markdown. The main issue I find with plaintext is that the minute you need anything like rich metadata on a document, it gets very clumsy, so the MD files are stored in a SQLite database which also holds any needed metadata.

I like the idea of plaintext as a least-common-denominator for many things, but it becomes difficult to use it beyond a small, constrained set of applications.

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Re:I still use plain text for everything. (2016) by wh3000 on Tuesday June 29, 2021 @07:06PM (#27682917)

Did the same (with PostgreSQL). Markdown notes in the browser. Text and images, attachments. Only the essential functionality I really need. Used Evernote in the past, but got more and more disappointed.

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Re:I still use plain text for everything. (2016) by asdff on Tuesday June 29, 2021 @02:24PM (#27679771)

You could just have a link to the rich metadata on the drive within the plain text document, and calling it up is as easy as grabbing the path and piping to your viewer.

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Re:I still use plain text for everything. (2016) by genjipress on Tuesday June 29, 2021 @02:34PM (#27679898)

That's a scenario I do plan to add support for, actually.

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Re:I still use plain text for everything. (2016) by jjjbokma on Tuesday June 29, 2021 @02:23PM (#27679755)

Can't you store the meta-data as a YAML block like how for example pandoc uses for several of its output formats?

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Re:I still use plain text for everything. (2016) by knazarov on Tuesday June 29, 2021 @06:39PM (#27682673)

There is an alternative: you can use a MIME envelope to store notes. This way you’ll have a plaintext container and a way to attach files in a portable way.

I’ve built a note taking system based on this idea: https://github.com/knazarov/notes.sh

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Re:I still use plain text for everything. (2016) by genjipress on Tuesday June 29, 2021 @02:34PM (#27679893)

Sure, I can do that. The problem is what to do if I want to mass update the metadata across an entire set of documents. It's just easier to do that with a DB.

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Re:I still use plain text for everything. (2016) by jjjbokma on Tuesday June 29, 2021 @02:36PM (#27679923)

That's very true, thanks for explaining.

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Re:I still use plain text for everything. (2016) by falcolas on Tuesday June 29, 2021 @03:19PM (#27680479)

So, silly thought: HTML.

Support for your metadata.

Still readable and writeable as plain text.

Lots of built-in support in the major text editors.

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Re:I still use plain text for everything. (2016) by blacktriangle on Tuesday June 29, 2021 @03:28PM (#27680615)

I tried going that way. Authoring HTML by hand is miserable, it totally breaks up your flow of writing. Then to make matters worse, reading HTML raw text vs reading in an editor is a painful experience as well.

I feel like if you wanted to write notes in HTML, you would need to do it from within some WYSIWYG editor environment that felt like plain text most of the time but easily let you drop into metadata, links, tables, etc.

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Re:I still use plain text for everything. (2016) by falcolas on Tuesday June 29, 2021 @03:32PM (#27680664)

Fair enough. I don’t necessarily agree with you, but I’m not you…

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Re:I still use plain text for everything. (2016) by genjipress on Tuesday June 29, 2021 @04:30PM (#27681319)

I don't want to use HTML.

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Re:I still use plain text for everything. (2016) by fridif on Tuesday June 29, 2021 @04:43PM (#27681472)

"I have a requirement for my grill. I need to cook steaks, but I don't want to use gas or electric because of valid reasons."

"Have you considered using charcoal?"

"I don't want to use charcoal, which is potentially one of the last viable options, for unspecified reasons."

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