Today I would like to reflect on a seemingly old, but persistent technology: that of printing. Where does it fit in the textsmith’s toolkit?

To what extent should we use AI as textsmiths? Should we dismiss it out of hand or use it as one of the tools of our trade?

Perl is in an interesting position today. It is no longer the language that every system administrator or text-processing enthusiast is expected to know, yet many of the ideas we take for granted today—powerful regular expressions, concise text transformations, one-liners, and “glue” programming—owe a great deal to Perl. Rather than asking whether it is obsolete, perhaps the better question is: what role does Perl play in the modern textsmith’s toolbox?

For a long time, it semed to be a taboo to talk positively about emacs and vim in the same sentence. In this post, I am going to show why I love and use both of these traditional Unix text editors on a daily basis.