[megameter]

The thing that I've kind of settled on with respect to text is that it's actually 2D variable width. The line ends, right? The 1D-ness is an encoding detail. The interface and presentation of an interactive editor is clearly a 2D one, albeit tailored around dealing with the variable-widthness.

What we get from spreadsheets that is quite nice, formatting-wise, is the cell data being of a rich type. A number of larger size doesn't take up more symbolic space, and therefore it remains fungible as a whole, rather than being round-tripped between number, string, number as is often the case.

When we use plaintext, suddenly a need for explicit binding of literals arises, and we become prone to "thinking" in terms of that binding layer and its apparatus, versus, say, something with a spatial analogy like a stack machine. They're Turing-equivalent, but one or the other may solve a problem more adeptly.