"Plain text has been around for decades and it's here to stay." – Unsung

Couldn't help riffing off on a tangent from the title (since the article is about diagramming tools)...

Dylan Beattie has a thought-provoking presentation for anyone who believes that "plain text" is a simple / solid substrate for computing: "There's no such thing as plain text" https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/theres-no-such-thing-as... (you'll find many videos from different conferences)

Text and text files are simple. I think this is their number #1 advantage.

There are limitations though. Compare a database of .yml files to a database in a DBMS. I wrote a custom forum via ruby + yaml files. It also works. It also can not compete anywhere with e. g. rails/activerecord and so forth. Its sole advantage is simplicity. Everywhere else it loses without even a fight.

I'm all for it, but it's dangerously mixing ASCII with the meaning of plain-text...

The list at the top could be longer:

- https://asciiflow.com/

- https://asciidraw.github.io/

Anybody know more?

From the title, I was not expecting a bunch of extended ASCII characters.

Unsung is one of the best little blogs around. Well worth checking out the rest of the posts.

I have a mixed opinion of unicode, but it's hard not to love the box-drawing / block-element chars.

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