The Joy of Plain Text

How I learned to stop worrying and love unformatted text files

My clever idea for a headline/header image joke was marred by the complete lack of copyright-free images of Bob Ross on the internet. My thanks to this cosplayer, I guess. Image: Carter McKenry (CC-BY 2.0)

When I was in Grade 6, we were taken down to the computer lab one day to try out a fancy new piece of software that the school board had gotten access to. They called it “Google Drive” , and it was one of the most amazing things I had ever seen.

It came with a word processor called Google Docs, which ran entirely inside of the web browser. It had its own file system. It synced across any computer you used. It saved automatically. And incredibly, it allowed users to edit a documents collaboratively in real time. After being shown the software, we spent the rest of the period screwing around with shared docs and writing rude messages to each other.

Something clicked in me that day. For my whole life, I’d been writing documents in Pages or Word. But these apps were clunky; they needed desktop applications and they required you to carry a USB stick around. When Google Docs became an option for me, I made an unconscious decision to gradually switch and never look back.

I realise that this is sounding like a pretentious r/thathappened post. I was not a visionary or productivity guru when I was 12. It’s just that I, like many of my classmates, knew a better solution when I saw one.