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Newbie working with plain text: best practices for formatting etc?

Matthew Chagnon | Jan 22 2008

Hey all,

I've searched far and wide online and am really surprised not to find very much info on this (perhaps I'm using the wrong search terms!).

After reading Bit Literacy, I decided that I wanted to starting using plain text files more at work, especially for notes. Unfortunately, years of reading 43F has enhanced my fiddly nature, and I'm more focused on trying to format my notes "correctly," or at least to have some sort of standard to stick to.

Does anyone have any best practices (or web resources) for working with text on a page? Currently, I find text files difficult to read (and line breaks confusing).

Any thoughts?

‹ What text files do you use? Synchronization between palm - outlook - google calendar ›
26 Comments
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TOPICS: Ask 43f, notes, Organization, plain text, Text, text file
swaroop's picture

Put this in your vimrc

Submitted by swaroop on February 5, 2008 - 7:18pm.

I use this:

" To insert timestamp, press F3.
nmap <F3> a<C-R>=strftime("%Y-%m-%d %a %I:%M %p")<CR><Esc>
imap <F3> <C-R>=strftime("%Y-%m-%d %a %I:%M %p")<CR>
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