Fun with Text!

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.

Written on May 20, 2018