plain text lists

2026-01-10 · team pico
this is the first post using our plain text lists on prose

Hello world! This is the very first post using our plain text lists on the prose platform. There's been some posts on hackernews lately about markdown and its market dominance in tech:

We thought this would be a fun opportunity to showcase our own text format, dedicated to making lists.

why lists?

When writing prose I like to start with an outline. An outline in its simplest form is a list of ideas. Sometimes what is most important is getting ideas on paper. When I focus on structure or flow of conversation too early in the process, I end up missing important details. I get too deep into a concept and jettison important ideas because it's too late.
Lists are helpful for any kind of mental task. They expand our short-term memory. They force us to think sequentially and turn vagueness into explicitness. -- Bernhard Wenzel
As us developers are all too familiar, everything can be thought of as a list of things: category theory, websites, or even programming languages.
So why not create a plain text list format for prose?

This service eventually turned into prose.sh which uses markdown instead of our custom format. At that point we felt like having two blog services was redundant so we killed lists.sh.

At the time this was the right decision, but to be honest, we just miss writing prose in our plain text list format.
So we decided to bring it back as part of prose.sh.

I haven't updated the docs yet but you just upload a `.lxt` file to us and that's it.

=: title hello world
=: description all your base are belong to us
=: date 2026-01-10

Hello world! Here is my post!

```
scp hello-world.lxt prose.sh:/
```
It supports all the same meta data variables that prose supports. I'll update the docs later this week, just trying to think about how to structure them against the markdown posts.

We are planning to iterate on plain text lists both the spec and how it is rendered on prose. You can see what this file looks like using our raw route