> [!tldr] My favorite files Plaintext files, technically speaking, are any file where the bits and bytes correspond directly to characters via a [[Character Encoding]] scheme, typically [[UTF-8]] or, more generally, [[Character Encoding|Unicode]]. This includes essentially **any file** you can open up in the terminal or a plaintext editor like notepad, [[VS Code]], or [[Obsidian]]. Plaintext, then is *not* [[Binary]] files or rich-text files. Plaintext *as it's used in practice* typically refers to the subset of all "technically plaintext" files that are *intentionally **meant*** to be read by humans. So [[HTML CSS and JavaScript]] are all plaintext file types... we don't *really* think of them that way. We usually reserve the term "plaintext" (in file contexts) to refer to things like `.txt` files, [[CSV]], [[JSON]], or [[Markdown]]. There's a (good) chance this is [[Confirmation Bias]] - but it "feels" like plaintext applications are becoming more and more popular. > [!note] > In [[Public Key Encryption]], and more generally cryptography, the term "plaintext" has a different connotation. I've a ton of notes about plaintext: - [[Durable File Types]] - [[Plaintext is Stateless]] - [[Plaintext Graph Data]] - [[Plain Text Durability]] - [[Plain Text Superpowers]] - [[Plain Text Weaknesses][[Plain Text Files are Really Just the Tex[[t]][t]] *** # More ## Source - self