One of the activities proposals was to try different tools each week and review them. So, let's do this.

There are good tools we can review, for example the ones listed on the kmandla's list and on the one thing well list.
Freem gave the idea on IRC for the first tools we review to be programs created by one of us. We have good developers among us, and good software as well.

What do you think? Which tool can we review first?

I made a wiki page here.

We can start with some of pranomostro's mini-tools:

• skip — skip text between two strings
  
• uu — unsorted uniq that does not lock up your pipeline
  

skip is a simple but handy tool.
I realized I have implemented skip a bunch of times when parsing stuff with awk. For example, tbgen, my verilog testbench generator, has to skip over C-style comments when parsing verilog.

I extracted the skipping code from tbgen and wrote an awk version of pranomostro's skip: here it is

As a bonus for using awk, regular expressions just work.

skip is pretty useful, it can help do things that would be complicated with sed, awk, or cut. However, as phillbush has shown, it's still relatively easy to implement.

It remains to be seen if I'll remember this tool even exists the next time I have to do a tasks that requires removing text within two strings.

I am currently evaluating paperless-ngx so the stuff I need for my income tax return is in a place where I find it without grepping old e-mails and banking reports.

Once you find a working combination of versions (paperless-ngx, even in its Docker version, has a number of dependencies which have a different reliability, depending on which version you use), it is relatively nice to use. However, paper folders are so much easier to set up.

That looks fascinating!

I'm always one for getting rid of paper in most situations. Paper is a nice backup though, but not great on its own.

How accurate is the OCR?

It works surprisingly well, I admit. :)

For some time now I've been accumulating bookmarks in a folder labeled "Things I Might Use". This seems like an appropriate thread to share some of them. These are just some little tools that caught my eye when they were mentioned somewhere but that I have never gotten around to actually taking a closer look. Some or perhaps all of them might be familiar to you, but they're new to me.

https://www.semicomplete.com/projects/fex/

https://ankarstrom.se/~john/git/repl/about/

https://github.com/baskerville/sxhkd

https://www.thregr.org/wavexx/software/tblutils/

https://github.com/Seeker04/srek

https://github.com/segf00lt/sreutils

Since the developer of my previously favourite macOS mail client now thinks it's kind of stupid that he decided against a subscription model back then, I used the past weekend to familiarise myself with mu4e. Turns out: I don't miss anything. And I can - finally - use my mail configuration everywhere where GNU Emacs exists. :-)

Admittedly: The fact that you first have to set up mbsync and msmtp on each computer is a nuisance. But I have stored all the necessary configuration files centrally, so that it is essentially done with installing applications and copying files.

Impressions so far: mu4e seems to be a much more powerful and user-friendly mail client than mutt (which I somehow seem to be too stupid for), especially if you (like me) have a handful of mail addresses and actively use them.

nq — Command line queueing utility.
These small utilities allow creating very lightweight job queue systems which require no setup, maintenance, supervision, or any long-running processes.

nq looks lovely, thank you.