Factors:
1. Accessibility. Not everyone has really fast (or stable) internet.
2. Environmental. There's no reason to use more computing power than necessary for the task at hand. It's wasteful. Very few people need the fancy features advanced text editors introduce.
3. Interoperability. Text files I write and send are readable *everywhere.* Try loading up Google Docs on a 1024x768 screen with a 256MB RAM Pentium 3. You'll be lucky if Google Docs even loads.
4. Privacy. A text file is easy to protect. GPG is the most straightforward. It remains small, and there's no way middle-men can read it. Google Docs? Google has root and they're not encrypted from them. So, good luck.
5. Account requirements. Text files require no accounts anywhere. All you need it an Internet connection and a DNS server that'll point your computer the right way. SaaS requires that you also have up-to-date software, a powerful computer, and that you register an account with them to access files shared with you.
6. Storage space. A text file takes kilobytes. A .docx file takes megabytes. My daily journal, which granted has some meta-data but is still plain text, is nearing on 580kb after three years of diligent, detailed journaling. I can't help but doubt that Word would even open a .docx file that large if formatted natively. (Thousands of headings, links, timestamps, etc.)
6. Feature-set. Plain text lets you do enough for 99% of all tasks. Yes, it's not as pretty, but within the bounds of putting characters into a file, you have complete freedom. Proprietary services, on the other hand, have a very very rich feature-set, most of which is irrelevant for 99% of users. The drawback of this is that every user is forced to load these rarely-used functions onto their own computer when the applications load up. That's wasteful, and likely cost the world hundreds of millions in unnecessary energy expenditure already.
TL;DR: Use plain text unless you absolutely positively can't help it. It's seriously better in every way.
#plaintext #emacs #txt #notepad #bloat #bloatware #saas #googledocs #msword #microsoftword #rant
RE: https://fed.bajsicki.com/notes/a6uy06mot0
