There are, in a very broad sense, two types of files: there are plain text files and there are binary files.
Plain text files contain exactly what you think they contain: plain text.
If a character appears on a known character encoding system (for example, ASCII or Unicode), then it can appear in a plain text file.
The nice thing about plain text files is that humans can read them just as easily as a computer can.
If you have ever monitored the serial output of an Arduino or similar device, you may have seen plain text streaming across your screen.
It may not have all made sense, but all the characters were familiar to you and rendered properly on your screen.
Linux uses plain text for many things, and it does so deliberately so that it's easy for users to view and modify what's going on inside their computer.
For instance, if you want to change the elements of your desktop theme, you can often do that in a text configuration file strategically placed within your home directory.
Some other systems use special binary formats or complex registries that obfuscate (at best) or bar (at worst) users from directly interacting with their own computer's settings.
It's a luxury most Linux users start to expect, and even come to depend upon, but in truth, plain text doesn't work for everything.
Plain text can be slow to parse, especially when there's a lot of it.
It can also be comparatively verbose.
For instance, if an application needs to know what icon set to load before it can display a window to the user, it's easier and faster to look for a unique code like **001011** than to sift through long strings until **GTK3_THEME=Adwaita Light** (to say nothing of then parsing the theme name from the variable name, separated by the equals sign).
But plain text is still useful for any number of things, and here are 10 reasons plain text still reins supreme.
