Plaintext miracles and wonders

Jack Baty noted a new Denote release.

I read each version's release notes, curious what's going on with it. This time I see a little bit of glasnost going on with regards to the kinds of links Denote generates, allowing org-mode links to exist a little more easily in the Denote ecosystem.

I'm all for Denote in theory. I am not for it in my own practice. But I remain amazed at how much stuff can be crammed into plaintext formats like org-mode, Markdown, etc.

Denote dblocks, for instance, wherein a plaintext file can house as-close-to-dynamic-as-makes-no-difference tag searches, are kind of something. I guess web publishing conditioned me to think of that kind of thing as something a database needs to be present to manage.

Likewise, Markdown wiki-links, the Marksman LSP module, etc. are all pretty cool. You can do a lot with just plain text and an editor with some smarts. 

It can still get stilted to use, though. A little fragile. A little verbose. Elegant in one direction at the cost of elegance in another. 

Still and all, like an old boss of mine used to say about some of the hacks I'd come up with to save the team time: 

"The marvel is not that the bear dances well, but that the bear dances at all."