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#plaintext

1 post1 participant0 posts today

I almost couldn’t bring myself to read this post. The thought of deleting snapshots of who I used to be is horrific to me, and I didn’t know if I could handle reading about someone else doing it!

Thankfully Justin only deleted his subscription to Day One,; he didn’t delete the actual records it contained.

Yet another case for always keeping the data and words you’d be sad to lose in simple text files.

#plainText #journal #app #futureProof

writingcooperative.com/journal

The Writing Cooperative · Journals Aren’t Forever - The Writing CooperativeBy Justin Cox

When John Gruber (with Aaron Swartz) created in 2004 he solved so many problems for me, some I didn't even know I had at the time. I was deeply invested in (still loving it!) but Markdown really revolutionized the way I do things! With being accepted more and more by the "common folk", I could suddenly express myself much easier.

Fast forward to today, I use Markdown *everywhere*! For blogging, READMEs, TODOs, and documenting both small and large projects.

Continued thread

It also made me curious about other text editors which don't require configuration, and don't tempt users to write hundreds of lines of configuration, but still offer powerful functionality.

Any recommendations for open source, opinionated, lightweight, UTF-8 supporting editors that don't break?

Boing Boing: You can still use plain text email—and maybe you should. “If you’re old enough to remember why you resisted the move away from plain text email, you might be pleased to know there’s precious little to stop you going back. Use plain text email is the plainly-named website that explains how. You don’t have to use Alpine (pictured above)—there are modern options!” Ah, the days […]

https://rbfirehose.com/2025/07/06/boing-boing-you-can-still-use-plain-text-email-and-maybe-you-should/

ResearchBuzz: Firehose | Individual posts from ResearchBuzz · Boing Boing: You can still use plain text email—and maybe you should | ResearchBuzz: Firehose
More from ResearchBuzz: Firehose

I’m enjoying transcribing the Articles of Faith children’s songs into ABC Music notation. It’s to fit the #French translation to the music, making it easier to memorise the text.

#MuseScore is another option, but I’m not sure it’s needed for this project. ABC is #plainText and thus supremely portable, and can be exported as xml, PDF, or interactive html for playing in a browser.

The EasyABC app is great, and a better experience than the (still convenient) #Obsidian plugin.

Replied to Andrew Leland

@andrewleland

While I'm a vi/vim/ed guy rather than an Emacs guy, I'll gladly cheer you on in your #plaintext & #CLI adventures.

For my personal finances, I use `ledger` (ledger-cli.org/) for #plaintextaccounting and I know it has some Emacs scripts available to make it easier.

For calendaring, I'm a big advocate for using `remind` (dianne.skoll.ca/projects/remin). It's incredibly powerful, and as a CLI tool, pipes well to other utilities.

I don't know if you have a preferred mail program—whether that's Gmail in a web-browser or Thunderbird for a rich-client, or a command-line mail program like mutt/neomutt or even classic `mail` (or its souped up cousin `s-nail`).

There's a "blinux" (blind Linux users) mailing list if that's your jam. I think it's at leb.net/blinux/blinux-list.htm I'm not blind/VI myself, but I lurk on the list and try to answer the occasional question as I have opportunity, and have an appreciation of keeping CLI tools accessible.

Anyways, here's cheering you on.

ledger-cli.orgledger, a powerful command-line accounting system - ledgerWebsite and documentation for the open source command-line double-entry accounting system named ledger
Replied in thread

@winterschon For other favorites:

Calendar: I love remind(1), a CLI calendar that is more powerful than any other calendar I've ever used. It's a little rough sharing events externally or importing external events (I see you CalDAV note), but for our household, it's great, and I wrote up a detailed blog post² on how I use it (it's a little out of date now, but still works).

Finances: I track mine in ledger(1), largely compatible with hledger(1). There's also BeanCount with its web UI, Fava, but I'm less familiar with that. I'm wary of handing all our household financial data over to some 3rd party, but I do want insights into our spending, saving, etc, so #plaintextaccounting is handy for that

Todos: some folks prefer TaskWarrior³ which is the 900lb gorillia in the CLI todo-tracking game, but I prefer simple todo.txt-style⁴ todo lists, and I symlink my todo.txt file to my ~/.plan so I can use finger(1) to get my todo list remotely.

They all have the advantage of storing all their data in #plaintext, meaning I can track it in git and sync it around between machines.

That said, I know CLI apps aren't everybody's cup of tea, but they fit my brain and I like keeping everything local. And they're all light on resources, so even the wimpiest RPi runs them fine.

¹ dianne.skoll.ca/projects/remin
² blog.thechases.com/posts/remin
³ taskwarrior.org/
github.com/todotxt/todo.txt-cl

dianne.skoll.caDianne Skoll's Web Site - Remind - Software Projects

Ah, yes, because what we all need is yet another tool to *hurl* plain text HTTP requests into the internet abyss 🌐. It's like playing fetch with a digital boomerang that nobody asked for, but hey, at least it's in plain text 🤦‍♂️. Maybe next, they'll invent a way to test email with smoke signals.
github.com/Orange-OpenSource/h #digitaltools #techhumor #HTTPrequests #plaintext #innovation #HackerNews #ngated

Hurl, run and test HTTP requests with plain text. Contribute to Orange-OpenSource/hurl development by creating an account on GitHub.
GitHubGitHub - Orange-OpenSource/hurl: Hurl, run and test HTTP requests with plain text.Hurl, run and test HTTP requests with plain text. Contribute to Orange-OpenSource/hurl development by creating an account on GitHub.

Over or under rated: Moleskine, Obsidian Sync, Markdown, Vim, Pizza? @hyde 's Over Under series has another episode to check out.

Read it on my blog ellanew.com/2025-06-13-moleski
or Hyde's (includes his take on those 5 things) lazybea.rs/ovr-022/

ellanew.comMoleskine, Obsidian Sync, Markdown, Vim, Pizza - Ellane WAre they over, or under rated? It was harder than I thought to decide.