this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2023
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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I used to use the command line, Bash, Awk, Sed, Cut, Grep, and Find (often piped to one another) quite often. I can recall that the few times I used Awk was usually for collating lines from logs or CSV files.
But then I switched to using Emacs as my editor, and it gathers together the functionality of all of those tools into one, nice, neat little bundle of APIs that you can easily program in the Emacs Lisp programming language, either as code or by recording keystrokes as a "macro."
Now I don't use shell pipelines hardly at all anymore. Mostly I run a process, buffer its output, and edit it interactively. I first edit by hand, then record a macro once I know what I want to do, then apply the macro to every line of the buffer. After that, I might save the buffer to a file, or maybe stream it to another process, recapturing its output. This technique is much more interactive, with the ability to undo mistakes, and so it is easier to manipulate data than with Awk and shell pipelines.
This is fascinating to me. Do you have any links or suggestions for this workflow to learn more?
I am glad you asked, because I actually wrote a series of blog posts on the topic of how Emacs replaced my old Tmux+Bash CLI-based workflow. The link there is to the introductory article, in the "contents" section there are links to each of the 4 articles in the series. The "Shell Basics" (titled "Emacs as a Shell") might be of particular interest to you.
If you have any specific questions, or if you have recommendations for something you think you would like to learn from one of my blog posts, please let me know. I would like to write a few more entries in this blog series.