So, this is basically a thoughtful list of text manipulation programs for the Mac. And a great list at that.
I was astonished and slightly embarrassed to find out that my personal answer to all his use cases are Emacs.
Still, I fully concur with his sentiment: Text encoding issues aside, the only data format with sufficient longevity and compatibility for long time storage is plain text. It is what drives technology. It is source code. It is markup. It is the universal format for communicating with computers and humans.
That said, a smattering of HTML or LaTeX can go a long way to make plain text more printer/reading friendly.
I think it's important to have your core text editor - the thing that makes you a living - be something that you can take with you anywhere. You're pretty much looking at vim or emacs in this case.
I think of HTML as an output format more than anything else. LaTeX, while powerful, is terrible for reading what you've authored. That's why Markdown is so appealing, it's a semantic syntax rather than markup; it's easy to write, easy to read, and has the added benefit of being programmatically processed.
Kudos for not reducing this to a vim/emacs flamewar.
I was astonished and slightly embarrassed to find out that my personal answer to all his use cases are Emacs.
Still, I fully concur with his sentiment: Text encoding issues aside, the only data format with sufficient longevity and compatibility for long time storage is plain text. It is what drives technology. It is source code. It is markup. It is the universal format for communicating with computers and humans.
That said, a smattering of HTML or LaTeX can go a long way to make plain text more printer/reading friendly.