I feel like a lot of use plain text proponents forget that outside of ASCII and now UTF-8, lots of alleged plain text documents with diacritics or non-latin characters are at least slightly difficult to open because of their somewhat esoteric encodings. Plain text isn't as universal as it is often claimed, although it is immensely simpler than some other formats.
But maybe we should all use monochrome bitmap files for everything? That would be very simple.
Yes, I feel this in my bones as someone who previously worked for a text messaging provider. Plain text has the deceptive appearance of simplicity, but it is actually one of the most maddening things to get right, especially if you intend to support the accurate transmission of said text to any possible text message receiving device in the world.
If it's 2022 and someone is _still_ saving plaintext in a non-Unicode encoding where going with Unicode is a perfectly viable option, I will personally ensure that (figuratively) they are burnt at the stake.
In addition to UTF-8, my language happens to have ~2 additional code pages/Latin based encodings. Some websites still serve (or very recently used to serve) text files in such broken encodings, so I have to convert such files before use. It's deeply unpleasant. Windows has supported UTF-8 in some fashion for over 15 years, get with the program people.
(I would make an exception for preserving historical non-UTF-8 files in their original byte-exact form, for the same reason that I wouldn't digitise an analogue photograph and then burn the original - but let's be real, all such files have been created by now)
That is why I tend to always keep files in plain ASCII, even though two out of my three primary languages need characters not in ASCII.
File longevity wins over grammatical correctness most of the time for me. I have text files going back to the 80s, so I'm glad I didn't use any fancier software to write them as they'd be completely unreadable today.
I think for a plaintext format to be "complete", it needs some mechanism of associating the language with some segment of text. Plaintext formats that don't acknowledge unified characters are just Latin-biased.
that's basically point - you can open an ascii file now because utf-8 is ascii oriented, but a utf-8 first editor will struggle with an old french text file for example. plain text has inbuilt biases which have changed over time, it's not as pure as simple as people say.
That's something I've always thought; plain text is pure and wonderful for me, an Anglo-writing American, because most of these formats were written for people like me.
I suspect for nearly every other language (or at least any language that doesn't use the ~100 characters/symbols used in the English alphabet), old ASCII text isn't terribly useful.
I should probably update that post. I took it down because of some issues with my hosting and then never really got around to bringing it back up. at the time, it only had about 20-30 items though.
I can tell you the export to HTML functionality is solid, but for something like a wiki you really need searchability which as far as I know zim templates do not provide. The available templates are also not responsive other than maybe the eight-five-zero theme that i modified for my site.
I don't see why you wouldn't consider graphical Emacs to be the canonical implementation. It's part of the primary codebase, several features enabled by default rely on it, and it's what is started when you run emacs with no arguments.
> ...and it's what is started when you run emacs with no arguments.
Well, actually...
Not as of macOS 11 it isn't. Installing the latest version from Homebrew also presents a terminal interface - hence my questions re the available GUIs.
Similar to mpv, they make a distinction between Formulas and Casks.
It smells incredibly clean. The air is very pure, apparently, and it's meant to be good for your healthm I noticed this - my cold cleared up while I was there (and started again soon after). There's a slight cave smell, but not really. I don't know what it's like to smell like being by tue ocean, but I don't remember it smelling much like british beaches.
In Emacs's defence, it didn't reimplement everything so mich as implement it first. When there's very little prior work to go on, often parts of the design won't be great, and then it becomes hard to move away from them.
Interesting how somebody else claimed about the same thing.
Yes, but eons have passed, things are different. Should everything else mold to Emacs or should Emacs fit into the overall OS/window manager/etc.
Maybe Emacs really is supposed to be an OS. I'm now wondering if there's a way to boot straight into Emacs. Clearly we could have a slimmer kernel /loader for that. :-)
I think a lot of folks value having their apps 'fit into' their OS. For me, I see the constant churn in desktop OS patterns as tiring and essentially useless. Emacs provides a wonderfully consistent interface no matter where I run it. I can see how it seems foreign to others, but it is consistent. For me, that's a fantastic trade.
I'd say that it's just as common to hear "google Our Brand" as "www.brand.com" at the end of television adverts now. That's entirely anecdotal, but Google (or other search engines, but basically Google) has been for a long time the way to access sites.
I see people every day searching for a brand and clicking rather than appending ".com". It's more convenient. If Google can profit off laziness, they will.
I tend to search the brandname if I'm not sure about what the domain is. There's quite a few Dutch brands that are either on .nl or .com. Or their brand is already in use by another company, so they've got some extra text in theirs. Or their name has a & in it and they might use "n" "en" or "and" in their actual domain.
Google doesn't like you using the term "google <something>" because that opens the door towards a genericized trademark (like xerox or cellophane), but plenty of advertisers buy keywords or a phrase on Google and then use terms like "search for <keyword or phrase> to find out more" in their radio/TV/outdoor ads.
I'm not sure if it's entirely laziness. Unless given a URI through some other medium, you can't expect to find a business by simply appending .com, .org, .net. there are only so many viable names in this structure and collisions are inevitable.
At one time, there were less organizations online but now, almost every single business, large or small, has a web presence over viable domain name scarcity.
As such, discovery service online is a necessity. Google and other search engines fill that void. Now should they completely replace domains? Probably not, at least not yet, but some other addressing scheme needs to exist if we want to be less reliant on services like Google. Personally, I just use other search engines. If I'm not finding results I fall back to Google.
It's a general-purpose programming language, so it can be used for most projects. Most problems can be solved with most languages, sure, but rust is fast and "safe", so people flock to it.
It has some nice features. Personally I never found myself besotted with it, in fact I rather dislike it and suggest ada instead. But rust is much more likely to get you a job.
Not sure about employability, at least here. A few months ago I searched for Rust job postings in Montreal (a decent-sized tech hub), and the only three results were Morgan Stanley accepting Rust as a "C++ or similar" language, and two listings for professional aircraft painters.
I'm suggesting Ada because in my mind it satisfies a similar niche to Rust, but offers a different perspective to Rust. Also I like it more.
Ada is part of the Pascal family, but goes further as it were in all the Pascal aspects, making it essentially the ultimate Pascal. In that regard it's interesting just by being different from C.
It's much more verbose than a lot of languages, which some people like, some people don't, I do. But even if you don't, it's nice to explore some of the design decisions taken in a language designed for use in large-scale systems with long lives.
It was created as /the/ language of the US Department of Defense, which once again may not interest you. I think that in itself makes it exciting, despite having almost no interest in any other aspect of the US.
The compiler has a linter (I guess is the right word) built in, similar to Go or something. It also checks for all sorts of other little errors or potential problems like misspellings, scope, overflows, and off-by-ones. As a language designed to be used in systems controlling space equipment, train networks, and other massive and important things, these features are quite important. I guess more languages have these things now but they were an Ada priority from the beginning.
Useful is definitely relative and for a lot of things Ada won't be the best choice. I've used it for very little, but I think it's a really well done language for the most part that suffers from not being so popular. Now that a lot of other systems languages are getting thrown around - Rust, Go, and things like Nim and Zig - I think Ada should get a share of the light too.
But ultimately I just think that "learn Rust" is said much too often with much too little justification when so many other languages that could be equally as enlightening or fun are around.
But maybe we should all use monochrome bitmap files for everything? That would be very simple.