Kindness City Blog
13 Sep 2021

Cool Things!

Some cool things I ran across recently:

Edbrowse

You may know of ed (the POSIX standard text editor). If not, open info ed in one terminal and ed ~/myfile.txt in another and have a bit of a play. You can use the q command twice in a row to exit without saving changes. Or once if you've already saved with w.

Anyway, as you just discovered, ed has a uniquely uncluttered one-dimensional interface. It's not just text-only – it literally only uses stdin and stdout, and never redraws the display. Which means it's ideal for working with a screen reader or a braille display. So it makes sense that someone would build a web browser and email client based on it.

Check out Edbrowse, which will do web browsing, text editing and email all with an ed-like UI.

Also: it looks ridiculously scriptable :D

Htmlq

Like jq, but for HTML. Uses CSS selectors as the query langauge. On github here.

Gron

Turns JSON into a series of one-line path assignments, which are easier to grep. On github here.

Crucially, it's a lossless transform, and the CLI can run it both ways. Which means I can suddenly use all my line-centric unix CLI tools to transform JSON!

Tags: ed json html grep unix web

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