alt Hacker NewsFun timing on this plaintext conversation. I built a little browser based plaintext playwriting app this weekend for a little weekend project. Found myself really hating 1. how clunk screenwriting software can be and 2. How unsharable the files are.
With plaintext you can hand the file off to anyone on any device--the caveat being absolutely no one wants to be handed a plaintext script. The software I used ten years ago to write plays is long since deprecated and those files are basically unopenable. Plaintext however remains.
John August has also talked about using plain text for movie/television screenplays, specifying a format based on markdown and hollywood standard: https://fountain.io/
Sharing aside, I imagine a plain text format would also be helpful for version control.