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  • Great GNU/Linux Utilities Not In Distros

    From Farley Flud@21:1/5 to All on Sun Aug 24 19:18:18 2025
    XPost: comp.os.linux.misc

    Does anyone on this dump actually *use* GNU/Linux for productive
    purposes?

    If so, then please post a favorite utility that assists you and
    that is not in the mainstream distros (which are all junk anyway).

    One of my faves is "FAR," or "Find And Replace":

    https://findandreplace.sourceforge.net/

    This is one FANTASTIC Utility! Most importantly, it spans multiple
    lines, as opposed to the line-oriented behavior of "sed" and other
    variants.

    The web site front page is a bit off in that the current version is
    2.0.3.

    Brother, if you ain't using FAR then you must have nothing to do.

    Please post other such "hidden" utilities/


    --
    Gentoo: the only road to GNU/Linux perfection.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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  • From =?UTF-8?B?8J+HtfCfh7FKYWNlayBNYXJja@21:1/5 to All on Sun Aug 24 22:44:00 2025
    W dniu 24.08.2025 o 21:18, Farley Flud pisze:
    This is one FANTASTIC Utility! Most importantly, it spans multiple
    lines, as opposed to the line-oriented behavior of "sed" and other
    variants.

    The web site front page is a bit off in that the current version is
    2.0.3.

    Brother, if you ain't using FAR then you must have nothing to do.

    False! I have my own command line text-stream editor, witch works in two
    modes: line (default) and optional block (mean: multiline). I use it
    every day among other my tools.

    BTW I can notable mention: my custom text editor and my custom file
    manager. They are very small, very smart: they use command line programs
    when possible, and even generate scripts in /tmp in order to preform
    required tasks, and my progs are easy extendable due to plug-in oriented
    arch. One of my gold rules is: "I solve problems, and not reinvent the
    wheel". My programs are fully usable for me and eg. my file manager has
    less than 1/10 LOC of KDE Krusader code sources. No mention that KDE
    Krusader is monolithic piece of crap without any way to add even
    primitive plug-in, and any mod require hack its enormous code sources.
    Sadly, this is the current "KDE way".

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Farley Flud@21:1/5 to All on Sun Aug 24 21:04:56 2025
    On Sun, 24 Aug 2025 22:47:16 +0200, 🇵🇱Jacek Marcin Jaworski🇵🇱 wrote:


    False! I have my own command line text-stream editor, witch works in two modes: line (default) and optional block (mean: multiline). I use it
    every day among other my tools.


    It cannot be as versatile as FAR.

    FAR can allow a full backup and restore of possibly thousands
    of files.

    FAR also provides a GUI for search and selection, with selection
    being either regex or globbing.

    You should check out FAR. After knowing FAR, you will use FAR
    all the time.





    --
    Gentoo: the only road to GNU/Linux perfection.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Lawrence =?iso-8859-13?q?D=FFOlivei@21:1/5 to All on Sun Aug 24 22:33:03 2025
    On Sun, 24 Aug 2025 22:44:00 +0200, 🇵🇱Jacek Marcin Jaworski🇵🇱 wrote:

    I have my own command line text-stream editor, witch works in two
    modes: line (default) and optional block (mean: multiline).

    Instead of writing my own editor from scratch, I find it far less work to create custom commands for some existing extensible editing engine, like
    Emacs.

    I did once have a need for multiline pattern matches, in a custom command
    for doing word counts on HTML documents. This required stripping out all
    the HTML tags (on a temporary copy of the text, of course), and tag
    content of course can extend across multiple lines.

    Apparently there are potential serious performance issues with doing this
    kind of thing. I solved the problem quite simply and efficiently, by
    searching for the beginning and ending tags separately.

    <https://gitlab.com/ldo/emacs-prefs/-/blob/master/unhtml-wc.el>

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Farley Flud@21:1/5 to All on Mon Aug 25 18:48:31 2025
    On Sun, 24 Aug 2025 22:33:03 -0000 (UTC), Lawrence D’Oliveiro wrote:


    I did once have a need for multiline pattern matches, in a custom command
    for doing word counts on HTML documents...

    Apparently there are potential serious performance issues with doing this kind of thing. I solved the problem quite simply and efficiently, by searching for the beginning and ending tags separately.


    Perl allows multiline regex replacement and I doubt that there are any performance issues.

    For example, to strip all javascript from HTML files I use this Perl
    command:

    perl -0777 -pe 's/<script.*?script>//gs' dirty_file.html | perl -0777 -pe 's/<noscript.*?script>//gs' - > clean-file.html

    Javascipt code can encompass hundreds of lines but this command strips
    them clean.

    The "-0777" option reads the whole file.

    If the file is too large for multiple passes then use:

    perl -p0e 's/<script.*?script>//gs' dirty_file.html | perl -p0e 's/<noscript.*?script>//gs' - > clean-file.html

    The "-p0e" option will replace line breaks (i.e. LF or CR/LF) with the
    NUL character.

    Perl is the greatly underrated programming language.

    The increasing hordes of incompetent dilettantes use Python.


    --
    Gentoo: the only road to GNU/Linux perfection.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Borax Man@21:1/5 to ldo@nz.invalid on Sat Aug 30 07:07:19 2025
    On 2025-08-24, Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
    On Sun, 24 Aug 2025 22:44:00 +0200, 🇵🇱Jacek Marcin Jaworski🇵🇱 wrote:

    I have my own command line text-stream editor, witch works in two
    modes: line (default) and optional block (mean: multiline).

    Instead of writing my own editor from scratch, I find it far less work to create custom commands for some existing extensible editing engine, like Emacs.

    I did once have a need for multiline pattern matches, in a custom command
    for doing word counts on HTML documents. This required stripping out all
    the HTML tags (on a temporary copy of the text, of course), and tag
    content of course can extend across multiple lines.

    Apparently there are potential serious performance issues with doing this kind of thing. I solved the problem quite simply and efficiently, by searching for the beginning and ending tags separately.

    <https://gitlab.com/ldo/emacs-prefs/-/blob/master/unhtml-wc.el>

    Emacs can do search and replace over multiple files in dired. Indeed,
    once you learn Emacs you can simply put the capability that is missing
    into Emacs, rather than have to lok for another editor, or write one of
    your own.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From =?UTF-8?Q?St=C3=A9phane?= CARPENTIE@21:1/5 to All on Sat Aug 30 09:53:12 2025
    Le 24-08-2025, Farley Flud <ff@linux.rocks> a écrit :
    Does anyone on this dump actually *use* GNU/Linux for productive
    purposes?

    Not you for sure.

    If so, then please post a favorite utility that assists you and
    that is not in the mainstream distros (which are all junk anyway).

    I'm a normal guy. So, if I have a need, someone else has the same need.
    If my need is very important, a lot of people have the same need. So, if
    a lot of people have the same need, there is a fair chance that someone answered it and packaged it. So if a lot of people have the same need
    and the answer is good, there is a really high probability for it to be available in main distros.

    One of my faves is "FAR," or "Find And Replace":

    https://findandreplace.sourceforge.net/

    It's available in main distros. You lost. Same player tries again.

    --
    Si vous avez du temps à perdre :
    https://scarpet42.gitlab.io

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Anthk GM@21:1/5 to Farley Flud on Mon Sep 1 15:08:24 2025
    On 2025-08-24, Farley Flud <ff@linux.rocks> wrote:
    Does anyone on this dump actually *use* GNU/Linux for productive
    purposes?

    If so, then please post a favorite utility that assists you and
    that is not in the mainstream distros (which are all junk anyway).

    One of my faves is "FAR," or "Find And Replace":

    https://findandreplace.sourceforge.net/

    This is one FANTASTIC Utility! Most importantly, it spans multiple
    lines, as opposed to the line-oriented behavior of "sed" and other
    variants.

    The web site front page is a bit off in that the current version is
    2.0.3.

    Brother, if you ain't using FAR then you must have nothing to do.

    Please post other such "hidden" utilities/



    - Moreutils is not well known
    - iomenu (far lighter alternative than fzf. Usage:
    cat ~/urls.txt | iomenu | xargs firefox
    cat ~/music.pls | iomenu | xargs mpg123
    and so on...

    - catpoint+pointtools from bitreich.org (gopher://bitreich.org)
    - sfeed from the same place plus sfeed_download from the randomcrap repo
    - soap as an xdg-open replacement
    - xml2tsv it's used from several tools, but it allows to quickly hack stuff
    - jimtcl, it's like a mini tcl/tk minus... tk but with some WIP SDL2 bindings.
    Cool to hack a quick irc/gopher/gemini/whatever client or tool you'll need.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Lawrence =?iso-8859-13?q?D=FFOlivei@21:1/5 to Anthk GM on Tue Sep 2 01:40:42 2025
    On Mon, 1 Sep 2025 15:08:24 -0000 (UTC), Anthk GM wrote:

    cat ~/urls.txt | iomenu | xargs firefox
    cat ~/music.pls | iomenu | xargs mpg123

    Why not

    iomenu <~/urls.txt | xargs firefox
    iomenu <~music.pls | xargs mpg123

    and avoid the UUOCs?

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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