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Reshaping Text

67 points by zdw 4y ago

siraben 4y ago
One issue I've encountered in the past when using text formatted with hard wrapping with non-technical people is that presenting the information usually goes fine, but when they want to edit the text a bunch of headaches ensue, since they don't use editors that reflow line endings or maintain spacing that would only be clearly visible in a monospace context.
breck 4y ago
Dammit it's very hard to go a day without getting a very high ROI from reading HN.
entelechy0 4y ago
staplung 4y ago
FWIW, if you could get almost the same effect from google docs (and presumably excel): if you cut/copy a grid of cells and paste it into something that only understands text (e.g. VScode) you'll get tab-delimited columns of text. I don't know if there's a way to get some of the niceties like left aligning but I've used google docs for this sort of trick many times. 1 5 9 2 6 10 3 7 11 4 8 12
Waterluvian 4y ago
> Note that the number used for the gutter size has to come immediately after the -g. You can’t leave a space between the option and its argument as you can with many other commands. I’ve seen this a few times. Why is that? Is there some syntactic ambiguity?
asicsp 4y ago
Another option is `pr` command: $ seq 15 | pr -3ts 1 6 11 2 7 12 3 8 13 4 9 14 5 10 15 $ seq 15 | pr -3ats 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 One difference is that you'll need `6` instead of `14` for the example in the article. The `-j` option of `rs` is cool.
tingletech 4y ago
my old colleague at the California Digital Library John Kunze wrote `rs` when he was at Berkeley, as well as `jot` and `lam`. These were inspired by the APL operators. https://jkunze.github.io/biography.html https://jkunze.github.io/biography.html
tpoacher 4y ago
I'm not on my laptop atm ... How do these compare to the column command on linux?

67 points by zdw 4y ago

One issue I've encountered in the past when using text formatted with hard wrapping with non-technical people is that presenting the information usually goes fine, but when they want to edit the text a bunch of headaches ensue, since they don't use editors that reflow line endings or maintain spacing that would only be clearly visible in a monospace context.

breck 4y ago

Dammit it's very hard to go a day without getting a very high ROI from reading HN.

entelechy0 4y ago

staplung 4y ago

FWIW, if you could get almost the same effect from google docs (and presumably excel): if you cut/copy a grid of cells and paste it into something that only understands text (e.g. VScode) you'll get tab-delimited columns of text. I don't know if there's a way to get some of the niceties like left aligning but I've used google docs for this sort of trick many times. 1 5 9 2 6 10 3 7 11 4 8 12

Waterluvian 4y ago

> Note that the number used for the gutter size has to come immediately after the -g. You can’t leave a space between the option and its argument as you can with many other commands. I’ve seen this a few times. Why is that? Is there some syntactic ambiguity?

asicsp 4y ago

Another option is `pr` command: $ seq 15 | pr -3ts 1 6 11 2 7 12 3 8 13 4 9 14 5 10 15 $ seq 15 | pr -3ats 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 One difference is that you'll need `6` instead of `14` for the example in the article. The `-j` option of `rs` is cool.

tingletech 4y ago

my old colleague at the California Digital Library John Kunze wrote `rs` when he was at Berkeley, as well as `jot` and `lam`. These were inspired by the APL operators. https://jkunze.github.io/biography.html https://jkunze.github.io/biography.html

tpoacher 4y ago

I'm not on my laptop atm ... How do these compare to the column command on linux?