Text vs Binary Formats

Why not just write it in plain text?

Text is universally accessible and widely supported. Binary has it's benefits, but human facing, it has to be text.

He's referring to the universal format being text itself.

Why would you need text format when only machines are involved?

For a computer, text is a binary format like anything else. We have decades of tooling built on handling linear streams of text where we sometimes encode higher dimensional structures in it.But I can't help feel that we try to jam everything into that format because that's what's already ubiquitous. Reminds me of how every hobby OS is a copy of some Unix/Posix system.If we had a more general structured format would we say the opposite?

Plain-text formats have always been slower for things that are not plain text. But even 30 years ago, when computers were even slower, Unix designers decided plain text was still the way to go, because it was easier to debug and easier for humans to work with. No specialized tools required, no poring over hex dumps. HTML won over other document formats. JSON and XML won over other binary formats. Any coder can look at JSON and see what is being transferred, without the aid of anything but a text

I used the URL gemini://adele.pollux.casa/gemlog/2025-08-04_why_I_prefer_human-readble_file_formats.gmi (the one linked to directly does not work on my computer).I prefer binary file formats (including DER) for many things, and I will respond to the individual parts as well as my own comments.> With human-readable formats, you're never locked out of your own data. Whether you're on a fresh Linux installation, a locked-down corporate machine, or troubleshoot

That is because it is a plain text, so it does not have those problems. My opinion is that plain text is good idea.

What's wrong with text files?

Text is preferred because a regular layperson might be able to read it if stuff breaks. See: XML, Json.