[TUHS] SunOS 4 documentation

John Labovitz johnl at johnlabovitz.com
Thu Apr 13 23:28:12 AEST 2017


On 2017-04-12 7:31 PM, Larry McVoy wrote:

> I love me
> some troff, even to this day.  I really really really wish that someone
> had done framemaker, word, whatever, that was the GUI interface that had
> troff under the covers.  Why?  Because you can version control the source


A bit off topic, but…

I’ve been researching modern macOS writing apps over the last few days. I was very surprised to find that almost all of them use Markdown as their primary format — not just for import/export, but as a storage format as well as a user interface. (Examples: Ulysses, Scrivener, ByWord.) It seems that Markdown and text files has become the gold standard in this particular class of app, even for folks who’d never use the command line. Granted, not all those apps expose the documents as normal, version-controllable files, but still, it’s pretty wild to see text formats be accepted again, at least in a narrow class of documentation-related tools.

—John


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