"Plain text has been around for decades and it's here to stay." – Unsung

ssivark•about 4 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)

keyle•25 minutes ago

I'm all for it, but it's dangerously mixing ASCII with the meaning of plain-text...

suprjami•about 3 hours ago

The list at the top could be longer:

- https://asciiflow.com/

- https://asciidraw.github.io/

Anybody know more?

snackbroken•about 1 hour ago

D2 https://d2lang.com/ added beta support for ASCII & Unicode output last year.

suprjami•about 1 hour ago

That would be interesting. I like D2 though the lack of control over the layout is a bit frustrating sometimes.

4k93n2•41 minutes ago

https://monosketch.io

shevy-java•12 minutes 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.

dlcarrier•about 3 hours ago

From the title, I was not expecting a bunch of extended ASCII characters.

Freak_NL•about 1 hour 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.

OuterVale•about 4 hours ago

Unsung is one of the best little blogs around. Well worth checking out the rest of the posts.

nullhole•about 3 hours ago

I have a mixed opinion of unicode, but it's hard not to love the box-drawing / block-element chars.

"Plain text has been around for decades and it's here to stay." – Unsung

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