Ask HN: Why did plain text never catch on? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why did plain text never catch on?

4 pointslvass8 comments

I've been using tools like Ledger, Org-mode, Groff and TeX for many years and feel like they're much more efficient and provide an overall better experience than popular WYSIWYG software. The only case WYSIWYG feels better to me is in the initial minutes or hours of usage/learning, afterwards it's so much more flexible and easier to get the exact output I want.

But there are professions in which these tools play a much bigger role than mine, and I see these people using Microsoft Office everywhere, often barely able to open plaintext files. I really want to understand why. Am I missing some advanced Office features? Is it just lack of experience on my part? Does my experience with programming languages or Emacs play a large role? Is Microsoft's influence and lock-in too strong?

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Many people are just more comfortable using WYSIWYG application. For them, it's easier to use preset templates and to apply formatting by highlighting, pointing, and clicking. And those WYISIWYG tools enable them to easily create more complex formats and add tables and graphics to documents, to share those documents, and to convert documents to PDF or HTML. The people who use those applications don't need to fiddle about with markup languages. Many of them don't want to learn markup languages (no matter how easy you might believe they are to learn).

There's nothing wrong with that. Plain text has its place and its user base. That user base isn't just technical people, either. WYSIWYG tools have their place, too.

IMO the question should really be why did plain text never catch on outside the developer community. Plain text is still king for coding, and technical people are more likely to be keeping notes etc in plain text.

I think it's related to visualization of hierarchy, emphasis, relationships, images etc. It's just harder to see the layout of a document in plain text, esp for people not used to doing so.

Of course thats not to say the visualization could not be built on an underlying plain text markup, it just wasn't in MS or Googs interest to do so. It is encouraging that a lot of the new wave of PKM tools (Dendron, Obsidian, LogSeq etc, plus my own, BrainTool) are built on a plain-text first model. Maybe its making a come back!

I think there are several reasons. I for one use text files a lot when I need. Excel does not support Regex, I can simply copy paste a column into a text file and apply regex, or find unique lines.

However, WYS* apps can do what most people does with text files and then some. I believe using text files are limited to those who are superusers or programmers, etc. (with exceptions of course)

> And I see these people using Microsoft Office everywhere

This can only stop when various polities adopt Linux (like in Germany where some region is switching to Linux). This means they have to be well versed in LibreOffice, which is decent enough, although I am hearing reports that it has rendering flaws for .DOCX documents, so it's not a silver bullet.

It's easier to share and collaborate on wysiwyg documents (I mean across a wide range of skillsets and interests, not in a technical sense), and Word has / had a critical mass. Google docs is definitely mainstream now as well.

Sharing office files is such a pain though. Let alone support for different formats, there's always inconsistencies between editors and versions. Issues were so common sometimes I'd create bad files to pretend I'd done my schoolwork, and no one suspected anything. OOXML presumably tried to fix this but it's so huge and difficult to implement.

I think the reason Google Docs has been able to challenge the MS Office hegemony is that they solved the sharing problem by putting the doc online and the ui in the browser.

It didn't?

Check out vfat.tools it is a staking pool search engine (kinda sorta not really) and I love how it uses a fake .txt file interface. Obviously it is just an illusion but I still like it

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