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Comment by danallison | Hacker News Reader

Calculist is plain text in the same way that markdown is plain text. Calculist is not WYSIWYG.

Hi, Couldn't try as download wasn't available but seems like a great tool from reading other comments. Btw, the GitHub sources are 4 years old and so is the latest release; Are you renewing the project again?

I'm currently brainstorming a notes platform for second order thinking[1], Say like a community submitted scenarios for second-order, third-order thinking. Would Calculist be a good fit for such notes?

[1] https://needgap.com/problems/263-plan-second-order-third-ord... (Disclaimer: My platform)

That's why Calculist is not actually plain text. Markdown is not plain text!

> Markdown is a lightweight markup language for creating formatted text

> Markdown, the simple and easy-to-use markup language

> Markdown's syntax is intended for one purpose: to be used as a format for writing for the web

It's formatted text or also called rich text.

It can be compiled to HTML and when viewed in a suitable viewer could be considered rich text, but markdown files are plaintext. Code sourcefiles are also plaintext. However, I think there should be another term (clean text?) that refers to text abscent of symbols which represent the markup. It would aid in conversation. For instance you might want to parse an HTML formatted document and be left with just the words and certain punctuation, or clean text (or something).

If code source files are plain text, I'm a bacteria.

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