Plain text has been around for decades and it’s here to stay (unsung.aresluna.org)
122 points by rbanffy 11 hours ago
TazeTSchnitzel an hour ago
> Fun to see a contemporary take on something that peaked between 1970s–1980s
Maybe that was the peak, but you had some very good TUIs in the early 1990's for DOS apps, where Windows hadn't quite completely taken over yet, but you very likely had a VGA-compatible graphics card and monitor, meaning you had a good, high-resolution, crisp and configurable-font text mode available, and also likely had a mouse. This is the stuff I grew up with: QBASIC and EDIT.COM for example. Bisqwit has a cool video about how some apps from that era could have a proper mouse cursor, even: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nlNQcKsj74
safety1st 34 minutes ago
The peak of TUIs is now. Take a look at Omarchy, an entire operating system built around terminals and config files, it's nirvana. I can only imagine how much farther down this road things may go as we enter a world where the primary interface is conversation with the machine in text. I'm sure I'll get downvoted for that last part because Reddit -- (cough) I mean Hacker News - hates AI, but I'm genuinely excited for the future.
user3939382 4 minutes ago
I hope it’s inevitable. Most users’ computing workloads by far are text oriented. The terminal is capable of flexbox now. If we built new terminals from first principles it wouldn’t look like bash. Current GUIs create massive complexity and power draw relative to their value. Over a long enough arc, economic inefficiency is doomed.
user3939382 5 minutes ago
I hope it’s inevitable. Most users’ computing workloads by far are text oriented. The terminal is capable of flexbox now. Current GUIs create massive complexity and power draw relative to their value. Over a long enough arc, economic inefficiency is doomed.
ssivark 8 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)
rmunn 4 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.
thaumasiotes 2 hours ago
> 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.
Whenever I hear this, I hear "all text files should be 50% larger for no reason".
UTF-8 is pretty similar to the old code page system.
mort96 an hour ago
lelanthran 2 hours 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.
benj111 2 hours ago
He has a YouTube channel, there's a talk on there.
He also discusses code pages etc.
I don't think the thesis is wrong. Eg when I think plain text I think ASCII, so we're already disagreeing about what 'plain text' is. His point isn't that we don't have a standard, it's that we've had multiple standards over what we think is the most basic of formats, with lots of hidden complications.
carra 34 minutes ago
I read that article long time ago, and for me it's a hard disagree. A system as complex and quirky as Unicode can never be considered "plain", and even today it is common for many apps that something Unicode-related breaks. ASCII is still the only text system that will really work well everywhere, which I consider a must for calling something plain text.
And yes, ASCII means mostly limiting things to English but for many environments that's almost expected. I would even defend this not being a native English speaker myself.
2b3a51 2 hours 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?
wonger_ 6 minutes ago
This stack overflow thread had a pretty good list of terminal plotting tools:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/123378/command-line-unix...
gnuplot, feedgnuplot, eplot, asciichart, bashplotlib, ervy, ttyplot, youplot, visidata
And there's a lovely ASCII plot in the AWK book: https://dn790008.ca.archive.org/0/items/pdfy-MgN0H1joIoDVoIC...
nxpnsv 19 minutes ago
Gnu plot dumb terminal mode?
dwb 4 hours 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.
adityaathalye 3 hours 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.
dwb 3 hours 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.
draven 4 hours ago
Also: M-x artist-mode in emacs.
suprjami 7 hours ago
snackbroken 5 hours ago
D2 https://d2lang.com/ added beta support for ASCII & Unicode output last year.
suprjami 5 hours ago
That would be interesting. I like D2 though the lack of control over the layout is a bit frustrating sometimes.
smusamashah 2 hours ago
https://xosh.org/text-to-diagram a list of lots of tools
electroglyph 2 hours ago
how about a unicode art tool?
1024kb 4 hours ago
I have a few more on my site under the bookmarks page. Link in bio.
4k93n2 5 hours ago
dlcarrier 7 hours ago
From the title, I was not expecting a bunch of extended ASCII characters.
Freak_NL 5 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.
benj111 2 hours ago
I would?
Would an emoji count as plain text?
What about right to left text? I have no idea how many editors handle that.
OuterVale 8 hours ago
Unsung is one of the best little blogs around. Well worth checking out the rest of the posts.
keyle 4 hours ago
I'm all for it, but it's dangerously mixing ASCII with the meaning of plain-text...
nullhole 7 hours ago
I have a mixed opinion of unicode, but it's hard not to love the box-drawing / block-element chars.
Joel11 3 hours 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.
hsbauauvhabzb 3 hours ago
* L a u g h s i n u t f 1 6 *
randomeel an hour ago
That’s cool ! How did you do that ?
shevy-java 4 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.