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.
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
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
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