Links
This is a constantly-expanding list of links to articles and sites that explain how to effectively use plain text in your life and your work. Get in touch with me if you have any suggestions.
If you’re looking for more links related to plain text, I keep a rather disorganized and steadily growing list in Pinboard.
Click the arrow beside any heading below to expand what’s under it.
Plain Text Websites
- Plaintext Productivity — Outlining a system for using plain text on Windows to organize yourself
- Text and Glory — Different ways to use plain text files
Productivity Articles
- 8 Everyday Things You Can Track with Text Files — As the title says ...
- 10 Plain Text Files You Should Have on Your Desktop for Higher Productivity — I'd say pick and choose the ones you want to use
- WorkingMemory.txt (The Most Important Productivity Tool You’ve Never Heard Of) — A guide to using a text file to track what you need to do
- Managing IT Projects in Text Mode — Good advice for managing any kind of project, not just ones in IT, using plain text
- Why I moved my tasks to plain text — As the title of the article says ...
- A Plain Text Personal Organizer — How one person runs his life out of a big directory of text files
- Go Plain: My Simplicity-Driven Personal Productivity System — Itamar Ostricher shares his plain text productivity system
- The unsexy plain text todo file — No, looks don't matter. Especially when maintaining a todo list
- How I’m Using Notational Velocity, Simplenote, and Merlin Mann’s QQ Trick as a Replacement for the GTD Application Things — A detailed explanation of how one person combined to a pair of tools and a concept to help him become more productive
Data
- Software is not data — On why plain text is as good as a binary format for storing data
- BASHing Data — A blog about manipulating data (usually as text) from the command line
- File System Infobase Manager — On why and how to use the file system for your notes (and other information)
Writing
- 5 Unexpected Benefits of Plain Text for Writers — Yes, writers can benefit from doing their work in plain text
- The Lo-Fi Manifesto — A reasoned explanation of why we should adopt Lo-Fi Production Technologies
- The Beginner’s Guide to Writing With MultiMarkdown — A look at how to use a flexible variant of Markdown
- A Plain Text Workflow for Academic Writing with Atom — Some good advice for using plain text to write. And that advice applies to other kinds of writing, too
- How To Use Git to Manage Your Writing Project — It's a bit geeky, but using this workflow can help ensure that you don't lose a draft or a version of whatever you're writing
Markdown
- Learning Markdown — My book, which offers a step-by-step guide to formatting documents using Markdown
- Markup, Markdown: Write In Elegant Plain Text — A good intro to the lightweight markup language
- Markdown Reference — A cheatsheet from the Commonmark project
- Mastering Markdown — A guide from GitHub
- How to Create a Markdown Table — A good how to, explaining this tricky task
- About 1400 Words of Skepticism about Markdown, and an Imagined Alternative — A well reasoned, contrarian look at Markdown
Other Markup Languages
- LaTeX-Tutorial.com — Learn about the popular typesetting language
- Getting Started with DocBook — An introduction to the markup language made for technical documentation
- reStructuredText – what-you-see-is-what-you-get plaintext markup language — A look at the markup language popular with the Python programming language crowd (and others)
- HTML.com — Learn how to use HTML and Cascading Style Sheets
- Getting to Know Textile — A look at the basics of Textile, a Markdown-like formatting language
- AsciiMath — An easy-to-write markup language for mathematics
- PreText — A markup language that combines the best of DocBook, LaTeX, and HTML
- DocBook Rocks — A quick dive in to about ten DocBook tags to help you get going with the language
- AsciiDoc – text document format for writing — Learn about a simple formatting language for documentation, books, slides, articles, and more
General Information
- A Plain Text Primer — Some advice for getting started with plain text
- Text rules for journals and notes — Thoughts about using rules from a plain text task manager with journal entries and notes
- Why Geeks Love Plain Text (And Why You Should, Too) — A good primer on plain text
- store everything in text files — Leo Babauta on why plain text can be a better choice
- How I organize everything with plain-text notes — Some good advice for taking, storing, and managing notes in plain text
- Plain Text — Quick look at the benefits of using plain text
- My Text Editor Journey: Vim, Spacemacs, Atom and Sublime Text — Tristan Hume looks back at the text editors he's used, and how he settled back into using Sublime Text
- always bet on text — A detailed look at why you can't go wrong by embracing a plain text workflow
- What can and cannot be done in a text file? — A measured look at where plain text is strong, and where it can fall flat
- How to Set Up a Text-Based Notes System — While aimed at Mac users, you can adapt this advice to whatever operating system and tools you use
- Plain Text Emails, Please — A good argument against using HTML in emails of any kind
- Simple and Universal: A History of Plain Text, and Why It Matters — A good overview of what plain text is, and why you should think about using it