Here’s a couple of screenshots from my new text editor:
I like plain text. I also like doodling while I write. Some things are just
easier to explain with a picture. But if I need to draw a picture today, I
need to stop writing plain text, pick an app, dismiss a couple of dialogs or
tours of new features in front of my face, think about all the ways it’s
acting for its creators rather than for me, copy my text into it, draw my
picture—and then I don’t have plain text anymore. I end up with some
bloated format that only one or two apps can open. Apps that may be
well-behaved now, but tomorrow? Who knows?
What is plain text, anyway? It’s a way to interpret a sequence of
bytes that a lot of people had to gradually invent a long time ago, now baked
so deep into our computers that we take it for granted. It’s simpler than pdf,
but it’s not trivial (oh hi there Unicode). Too bad the inventors of plain
text didn’t have a graphical screen or a mouse. Or is it? What if we pretend
we can go back in time, and create a transparent, gracefully degrading
plain-text format that is trivial to build viewers and editors for?
Presenting lines.love. Initially it’s a vanilla text editor.
You can type some text into it.
Some more.
If you look inside the file, you see plain text.
$ cat lines.txt Hi there. I am some text.
But what are those little boxes?
Click on one, and you get a space you can draw in.
Here’s a line.
And it’s still plain text.
$ cat text
Hi there.
```lines
{"p2":{"x":141,"y":85},"mode":"line","p1":{"x":34,"y":44}}
```
I am some text.
Text you type in will always be readable. The drawings take a little code to
display, but not much (see below). If you find yourself in a situation where
you can’t display them, well you still have the plain text. And
