While plain text is compatible with virtually 100% of every OS ever, when I try ... | Hacker News

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polygot on June 13, 2017 | parent | context | favorite | on: The future of education is plain text

While plain text is compatible with virtually 100% of every OS ever, when I try to open a txt file on my windows machine it asks what application to open it in, since there are no default apps (Windows 7 and earlier.) This might make it appear that plain text files are a "special" format because it doesn't open up when you double click on it.

I have sent plain text files to some of my colleagues in the past (so that there is a 100% chance that they could read the file), and they were unable to open them because of this issue with choosing the default application, and asked me what app they needed to download to view the files.

ReverseCold on June 14, 2017 [–]

I'm pretty sure .txt opens in notepad..?

polygot on June 14, 2017 | [–]

It does, but sometimes the line breaks don't show up so it's all on one line with what appears to be tabs. WordPad works fine though.

ReverseCold on June 19, 2017 | | [–]

Save your .txt files with CRLF(Windows) line endings, not LF (Linux) or CR (Mac). Your txt files should now work on all (relevant) OS.

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