In the early days of screen-based personal computing, all word-processing was done in plain text. Then, in 1984, Apple introduced its first version of the Macintosh desktop computer, which presented word-processing documents in windows that displayed a variety of typefaces and fonts.
WYSIWYG word-processing (the acronym, pronounced “Wizziwig,” stands for “What You See Is What You Get”) rapidly caught on. Today, most people edit text documents in WYSIWYG editors such as Microsoft Word or Google Docs.
WYSIWYG represented a big advance in usability. Why in the world would anyone go back?
Here are a few reasons.
- Plain text editors and plain text documents open faster.
- Plain text documents take up less space on your hard drive.
- Editing in plain text reduces distractions. You can focus on your content, saving decisions about visual presentation (font selection, for example) for later.
- Searching a folder full of plain text documents is faster than searching a folder full of WYSIWYG documents.
- Plain text editors make it easy to carry out global search/replace operations across a folder full of plain text documents.
- Every find yourself struggling to tame a bulleted list like this one in Word? Maybe you can’t get yourself out of list mode and back to paragraph text without creating unwanted blank space? You don’t face this kind of issue when you edit in plain text.
- This point can’t be emphasized too much: Plain text files are highly interoperable across software applications and operating systems. Once you’re Getting Started with Plain-Text Editors, and you’re learning about different editors such as TextEdit, VS Code, and BBEdit, you may wonder, for example: will my VS Code files open in BBEdit? They will! Although each editor has its own interface, with its own look and feel, your plain text files remain the same no matter which editor you open them in. You can edit a file in TextEdit on Monday, VS Code on Tuesday, and BBEDit on Wednesday, and nothing about the file itself will differ (except, of course, for the changes you make to the file’s content). Start editing on a Mac and pick up right where you left off in Windows. You can even edit your files from a terminal window. Your files aren’t “BBEdit files” or “VS Code files.” They’re just plain text files.1
Because plain-text editing is fast and lightweight, producing files that are easily searched, it’s especially well suited to tasks like note-taking and journaling.
“The Quiet Revolution of Plain Text” makes the case this way:
The modern document is a strange artifact. Open any word processor and you are immediately confronted with decisions that have nothing to do with writing: font choice, margin width, line spacing, header styles. Before you have written a single sentence, you are designing a page.
This is not a minor distraction. It is a fundamental confusion of concerns. Writing is the act of organizing thought into language. Formatting is the act of organizing language into visual space. These are different skills, performed by different parts of the mind, and forcing them into the same moment produces worse results at both.
Finally, even if you don’t create files in plain text, there are advantages to knowing how to use it. In some instances, editing spreadsheet data in a .csv file is just faster and easier than doing it in Excel or Google Sheets. If you learn the relatively simple syntax for .ics files, you can create or modify calendar items with fewer clicks. If you already know, or take the time to learn, a little html (it’s not that hard!), you can exercise a lot more control over web pages you create in Brightspace or WordPress — or troubleshoot issues on existing pages.
- There are, of course, some differences across plain text files. At bottom, computers understand only strings of 1’s and 0’s, not the alphabet; every letter and number you’re reading on this page maps to such a string. Different standards for mapping text to 1’s and 0’s have been developed over the years; examples include ASCII and Unicode (which itself has variants, such as UTF-8 and UTF-16). But the important thing to remember about these different mapping schemes — also known as “character encodings” — is that each represents an open standard, so every plain text editor can in principle work with any one of them. For more on the importance of open standards in computing, see the Document Foundation’s article on “What We Owe Each Other, in Millimetres and Volts.” On the vexed history of propriety standards in computer document-creation, see the foundation’s article, “How proprietary formats have become Microsoft’s main tool for lock-in.” On interoperability in general, see Cory Doctorow, “IP“. ↩︎