"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)

rmunn•15 minutes 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.

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•44 minutes ago

https://monosketch.io

keyle•28 minutes ago

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

shevy-java•15 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 4 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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