Text Manipulation Quotes

The fundamental problem with vi is that it doesn't have a mouse and therefore you've got all these commands.

I think one of the interesting things is that vi is really a mode-based editor.

It is formatted, and I'm tired of using vi. I get really bored.

Editing is now the easiest thing on earth to do, and all the things that evolved out of word processing - 'Oh, let's put that sentence there, let's get rid of this' - have become commonplace in films and music too.

'Dammit I'm mad' is 'Dammit I'm mad' spelled backwards.

Grab a pen and put down some words - your name even - and a title: something to see, to revise, to carve, to do over in the opposite way

It's very important to understand that the 'Talk' piece was not an excerpt, it was an adaptation, which means I compressed different parts of the book and made a new piece.

I propose that we insert a "not" before every verb in the text.

Then after that came word processors and it's hard to make those laugh.

The reason I use ed is that I don't want to lose what's on the screen.

In our daily lives as programmers, we process text strings a lot. So I tried to work hard on text processing, namely the string class and regular expressions. Regular expressions are built into the language and are very tuned up for use.

Eventually I found it had been working all along-but didn't show anything on screen until it had the first full page of text. I inserted 30 new lines, and suddenly my toy said 'hEllO woRlD'. An hour later I understood alphabet shifting rather better!

I do so much revising as I go along; I wonder how I could write books if I hadn't grown up in the computer age. I think I'd be a very different writer. I find myself cutting and pasting, changing things around and deleting whole paragraphs constantly.

What Jerry has done, in a masterful way, is go through and select portions of the Scripture and put words in Jesus' mouth that are legitimate because they already appear in the Bible.

I cross out words so you will see them more

A lot of my work is about text taken to the point of abstraction.

I think about all my scenes. I do so much revising as I go along; I wonder how I could write books if I hadn't grown up in the computer age. I think I'd be a very different writer. I find myself cutting and pasting, changing things around, and deleting whole paragraphs constantly.

In religion, What damned error but some sober brow Will bless it, and approve it with a text, Hiding the grossness with fair ornament?

When I think about the books I've written, it probably takes 150,000-200,000 words to get a 50,000 page book. Highlighting something and hitting Cmd-X is second nature.

I cross out words so you will see them more; the fact that they are obscured makes you want to read them.

I think that the reader should enrich what he is reading. He should misunderstand the text; he should change it into something else.

So Chuck and I looked at that and we hacked on em for a while, and eventually we ripped the stuff out of em and put some of it into what was then called en, which was really ed with some em features.

But more than 15 sections in Chapter 8 of the report-the key chapter setting out the scientific evidence for and against a human influence over the climate-were changed or deleted after the scientist charged with examining this question had accepted the supposedly final text.

People sometimes ask me if it is a sin in the Church of Emacs to use vi. Using a free version of vi is not a sin; it is a penance. So happy hacking.

Pascal in his bitter rendition of the practices of the Jesuit intellectuals he despised, including their demonstration of "the utility of interpretation," a device of manufacturing consent based on reinterpretation of sacred texts to serve wealth, power, and privilege.