Plaintext is vastly underrated as a storage mechanism
@cypnk I think you'd just be moving all the compatibility problems to another layer of abstraction, because like with ELF people will make up their own chunk types and use existing ones in nonstandard ways. And Unicode is its own can of worms since it basically expects everyone to conform to ONE code space for their text, which is a political nightmare.
@cypnk Just encode everything as MIME.
@seanl That's a very good point. I was actually partly inspired by the FITS format used in astronomy. I like how it incorporates not just the image, but the raw sensor data. It's actually closer to a self-contained database than just a file format
@cypnk I've used a number of note-taking strategies over the course of grad school, but the one I always come back to is:
Folders of unformatted text files whose names start with ISO-8601 compliant dates
@bgcarlisle Self indexing FTW!
Seriously, it solves so many problems before they even start. I do the date-topic format and never lost a day's notes. So easy to backup too
Do you use the dashes?
I got in the habit of not using them way back when there was an 8char filename limit.
Typical notes name today remains:
20180410.md or .txt
Old habits change slowly, I guess.
There's no doubt about dashes making the date easier to read.
File names for me are mostly for journal entries these days, and nobody else generally sees them.
The dashes also conform to ISO-8601
Those spaces trip me up.
I guess that I don't like spaces in file names because of web uses.
I find word-separating dashes most comfortable when more than two words are needed. All lower case,
Habits of a career "lifetime".
@Algot @bgcarlisle I do use dashes too. My speed reading is rubbish so it helps to separate the words
@bgcarlisle @cypnk out of interest, which text editors do you use?
@axblain @cypnk @bgcarlisle
Just one of many articles about taking notes in plain text: http://chris.moo-art.de/2017/09/sublime-text-the-better-nvalt-for-zettelkasten-workers/ #sublime #zettelkasten
@chrwahl @bgcarlisle @cypnk this is great. Thanks for the link. I should give Sublime a try
@cypnk do you work at tmobile austria? ;)
@rmxr Ha! Except for passwords (unless hashed)
I wonder if there's a way to combine ELF, text, whatever encoding it uses (UTF etc...) and LZ78 compression to build a universal "standard file" format
Regardless of OS, CPU architecture, endianness, and all other peculiarities, instead of specifying what can run it, just include "what it has" and let the user decide what program to use to open it