Some enhancements to search and search and replace.
Posted: Mon Oct 20, 2003 2:27 am
Recently I have had the unenviable pleaser of restoring a whole system from backup tapes for a client. For reasons that I’ll not bore you with, we had to edit a backup listing to obtain all the file names that would be stored.
During this exercises it became apparent the modern text editors have lost some of the futures that used to exist in their predecessors the humble text processors that are still the only way to manipulate text on some of the lager platforms. As a result it was much, much easer to use the old faithful text process Tedit on the Tandem to get this job done, it took 2 minutes to do so.
Some of the futures would really be nice to have on modern text editors:
1)- The ability to specify columns in searches or search and replace
2)- Negation in searches or search and replace i.e. NOT containing search text
3)- The ability to manipulate or search for start of line, space, and carriage return in searches or search and replace – if I recall correctly you could replace carriage return in the pervious version of TextPad.
During this exercises it became apparent the modern text editors have lost some of the futures that used to exist in their predecessors the humble text processors that are still the only way to manipulate text on some of the lager platforms. As a result it was much, much easer to use the old faithful text process Tedit on the Tandem to get this job done, it took 2 minutes to do so.
Some of the futures would really be nice to have on modern text editors:
1)- The ability to specify columns in searches or search and replace
2)- Negation in searches or search and replace i.e. NOT containing search text
3)- The ability to manipulate or search for start of line, space, and carriage return in searches or search and replace – if I recall correctly you could replace carriage return in the pervious version of TextPad.