So much to say, and so little time to type it. … I spent a fun hour or two the other night, trying out random little pieces of software, and seeing what they did. My favorites this time were two little tools from the same author: Michael Haardt at moria.de, who also has the teapot spreadsheet to his fame.

The first one is called fe, so named for its function as a folding editor. I’ll admit I didn’t get too far into this one because it’s intended to follow emacs style, but judging by my initial attempts, it is rather interesting. Whether or not you like it will depend on whether or not you need an editor that takes up less space than emacs, but follows similar keybindings and can fold lines.

But among the things I liked were the fact that it can fold from arbitrary points, rather than matching pairs. So as it seemed, you could fold any particular block of lines, as you liked. Again, as I said, I really only scratched the surface, but it struck me as useful. Try it and see.

dehtml I have a little more use for, because as you might have guessed from the name, this one strips html coding off documents. This is particularly nice for me, as I have an occasional need to strip codes off long passages of text, and reformat them for documents. Being able to carve out all the coding in a matter of split seconds — and even adjust the resulting format for a “prettier” look — is a huge time saver.

There’s a sister program to dehtml, named deroff, which I believe does the same for roff coding. I know nothing about roff though, and have no need to strip those documents either, so I’ll admit I didn’t try it.

There are quite a few more interesting tidbits on Michael’s site, including (believe it or not) some CP/M stuff and even a BASIC interpreter. I might have to look closer at the latter; I never really graduated past BASIC in my programming evolution. But take a second and see what’s there, something might interest you.

In any case, in the little spare time that I have these days, I’m usually tinkering with esoteric little console programs that I sometimes find tucked away on the Web. This I call fun. 🙄