There are not many computer file formats I would trust to still be readable fifty years from now, but plain text is one of them. A text file cannot embed a spreadsheet or preserve elaborate page layouts, but it stores text in one of the simplest and most widely understood forms in computing. The Unicode Standard defines plain text as a sequence of character codes, without additional formatting information. I can create a text file on Linux, copy it to a Windows machine, put it on a web server, open it in a terminal, search it with command-line tools, or edit it with any number of programs. Very little about the file depends on how it was created.
Plain text is not some forgotten technology. It remains part of the basic plumbing of computing. Source code, configuration files, and log files are commonly text. Unix and Linux systems are full of text files. HTML, XML, JSON, CSS, shell scripts, and programming languages are built around characters that humans can inspect. When something goes wrong with a text configuration file, I can inspect it directly, copy it, compare versions, or make a backup without needing the program that created it.
One of plain text’s greatest strengths is that an enormous collection of tools already knows how to work with it. On a Unix-like system, a text file can be handed to grep, sed, awk, sort, diff, and many other utilities. A script can process thousands of files without pretending to be a human clicking through menus. The real advantage is that the information is not tightly coupled to one interface. Plain text leaves more choices to the user.
Source: Hacker News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing