Tue 01 September 2026

I wanted to start this month's theme off with something pretty light and easy to write. Indeed, I've written about the beauty of "plain text" at length last year:

• 2025-07-26 Why I Love the Command Line
• 2025-07-21 Why I love vim
• 2025-04-11 Why I love Markdown

Without re-hashing the specifics of what I said in those posts
(or really bothering to re-read them ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)),
I just want to write what makes me grateful when I sit in front of a blank page of text.

Honestly, it's both the immediacy and plainness that I love, especially when using dusty old nvi as my editor. There's no syntax highlighting, there's no bold and italics, there's barely a ruler or status line, there's no cursorline, no airline, no conga line, whatever. 😄

It's just text! And text is beautiful.

So much of our modern technical world is overcomplicated, divided, and conquered. Siloed "social" networks. Clunky websites. Kafkaesque web forms and interfaces.

Text is completely on the surface. Nothing weird lurking beneath. It is what it is.

"What You See Is What You Get" (WYSIWYG) was the big slogan of graphical word processing and desktop publishing in the mid 80s to 90s, and in terms of UI and printing, they were right. But in terms of UX, to me, plain text is way more WYSIWYG than any fancy graphical editor. Plain text is compatible with everything, can be edited with anything, can be manipulated (in a good sense), massaged, munged, and managed five hundred ways from Sunday. That "plain" text format that we had to deign to use when transferring documents betwixt incompatible systems decades ago is now the lingua franca format of the entire world (other than, I guess, docx and PDF, but eugh!).

I haven't done it in a long while now, but one thing I used to do when I was feeling stuck in journaling was to make what I called a WordGrid in my editor. If you understand vi commands, you'll get an idea of what the following string will create (or you can try punching them in your own favorite vi-style editor, whether vi, nvi, vim, neovim, or even Kate!) —

i++[E]82i-[E]yypO||[E]82i [E]yy23p

Note: the "O" above is the capital letter O, not the number zero. Also, the [E] is shorthand for the Escape key. Here are a couple examples with alternate representations of Esc (^[ and ⍈):

i++^[82i-^[yypO||^[82i ^[yy23p

i++⍈82i-⍈yypO||⍈82i ⍈yy23p

If you followed those instructions precisely, you'd wind up with a text box like the following (but larger):

+--------------------+
|                    |
|                    |
|                    |
|                    |
|                    |
|                    |
+--------------------+

The larger version gives you a perfect 80x24 text box with a one character space on the left and right, which you can then fill out in replace mode, kind of like a crossword puzzle of your own creation with an invisible grid.

I haven't done a WordGrid like that several years, but it was just one of many ways I've enjoyed the beauty of plain old text. :)

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Category: Tech
Tags: Beauty   Computing   Monthly themes   Non-religious post   Productivity   Writing