#Taskpaper nvalt upgrade#

md, for Markdown, John Gruber’s simple markup syntax.

In Editorial, I create plain text files but, instead of a. (Maybe there’s an actual name for this and I just don’t know it if so, please let me know in the comments.) For instance, I am writing this post, in plain text, in a remarkable new iPad app called Editorial. I get that - but I think Viticci is neglecting a really interesting development in recent writing software, what we might call enhanced plain text. I didn’t drop plain text altogether: I chose plain text for some tasks, and started using other apps for different purposes. It’s silly to deny the fact that, in today’s modern Web, we’re dealing with all kinds of rich content, which gets lost in the transition to plain text or hierarchical file structures (such as Dropbox) managing tasks in a text list is an elegant, old-fashioned concept that I’m sure Don Draper would have appreciated 50 years ago, but that, today, I wouldn’t choose over smart features like alarms, notifications, and location data in my todo app. By saving links to interesting webpages as plain text URLs, I was losing the ability to easily tap on them and open them in a browser by organizing tasks in a plain text list, I started feeling like a GTD hippie, presumptuously denying the higher appeal of tools like OmniFocus and Reminders.

I came to the conclusion that, in spite of the inner beauty of plain text, some things were better off as rich text or contained inside an app’s database. Plain text files are very small and fully portable: they can be opened on any computer, and are as future-proof as anything in this vale of tears can be.īut still, I read with interest a recent post by Federico Viticci that points to the limits of a plain-text-only workflow:

#Taskpaper nvalt upgrade#

For some years now I have been a big believer in the Gospel of Plain Text: eschewing whenever possible word processors, and indeed anything in a proprietary file format that creates documents I might someday be unable to open - or could open only by paying a hefty upgrade feed to a software maker.