https://blog.thetextsmith.com/categories/reflections/ Recent content in Reflections on Under the Anvil Hugo en-us Fri, 14 Aug 2026 22:25:24 +0200 https://blog.thetextsmith.com/reflections/the-place-of-the-printer-in-the-textsmith-s-workshop/ Fri, 14 Aug 2026 22:25:24 +0200 https://blog.thetextsmith.com/reflections/the-place-of-the-printer-in-the-textsmith-s-workshop/ 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? https://blog.thetextsmith.com/reflections/ai-is-a-tool-not-a-threat-a-textsmith-s-view/ Tue, 11 Aug 2026 20:57:31 +0200 https://blog.thetextsmith.com/reflections/ai-is-a-tool-not-a-threat-a-textsmith-s-view/ 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? https://blog.thetextsmith.com/reflections/is-perl-still-relevant/ Mon, 03 Aug 2026 07:33:46 +0200 https://blog.thetextsmith.com/reflections/is-perl-still-relevant/ 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 Rather than asking whether it is obsolete, perhaps the better question is: what role does Perl play in the modern textsmith’s toolbox? https://blog.thetextsmith.com/reflections/my-personal-reflection-on-editor-wars/ Tue, 21 Jul 2026 14:45:30 +0200 https://blog.thetextsmith.com/reflections/my-personal-reflection-on-editor-wars/ 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.