Last night I was thinking about how to do text processing better. At work we constantly need to look through logs. I frequently would like to high information I don’t need and only show what’s relavent. However, I also keep reaching for less, which is a good tool, but getting a little long in the tooth. I was starting to think of a tool that could be like less but could high and show information. Of course, like any computer hacker, instead of looking for one I started to think about writing one. This lead me to scour the web for information about text processing.

I stumbled upon kilo, a small C program for doing text processing. I had great fun forking the code and playing around with it. And then I found Jeremy Ruten’s Build Your Own Text Editor, which is sort of a tutorial on how kilo works.

Some more resources I haven’t had a chance to read yet are:

https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/ncurses-intro.html
https://vt100.net/docs/vt100-ug/chapter3.html

I’m probably not going to write my own tool for my original goal, but it’s very cool to see what existing tools are out there.