Plaintext

Plain text is life!

Tools

• awk, primarly to work on record-based text files.
• emacs (GNU Emacs), a wonderfully customizable text editor.
• magit, a world-class git porcelain inside emacs.
• Sorting in emacs by Susan Pal.
• graphviz, graph visualization from plaintext files.
• grep, a tool to pattern-match lines of text.
• hexdump is needed from time to time to understand those other formats.
• perl, an old classic, famous for great one-liners (among other things).
• PlantUML, produces visualization for various kinds of diagrams described in plain text.
• reveal-talk, simplified plaintext presentations with reveal.js
• vim a customizable highly modal text editor.
• visidata an interactive console tool for tabular data. It's "plaintext-adjacent", so to speak.
• vscode (Visual Studio Code) supports text file editing of course, including first-class support for markdown.
• https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=goessner.mdmath, adds support for TeX math to markdown files.

Structured Formats

There are multiple ways in which some structure is often overlaid on plain text.

• Atom
• CSV and its close cousin, TSV
• JSON
• Markdown
• XML
• YAML

Workflows

• Timeline diagrams with PlantUML. How to use the timeline diagram to handle various modeling scenarios.
• Tools for plaintext specs. Breaking down tools by their place in a software specification workflow. Also how to improve them.

Resources

• Box-drawing characters
• CLI text processing with GNU awk, from leanbyexample.
• Emacs Redux, an excellent blog.

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