ssed // sed/awk-replacement and commandline swiss army knife

I am… embarrassed and proud of ssed. I started writing it in 2012, I shit you not. At that time, I just wanted a version of sed where I didn’t have to sigh and roll my eyes at the weird regex syntax and lack of support. So I created ned (node + sed) and just implemented a couple tools, like s/../.. and g/../.. and I dunno what else, p/ maybe?

Fast-forward, and I kept tweaking it here and there, but there was a long time when I stopped using it as much, and someone asked me if I would give them the npm package name, and since I have asked the same of others (not always successfully, but that’s OK) I figured I had better acquiesce to a reasonable ask. But then I started working on it again, and I needed another name… ssed was available.

super-sed? silly-sed? superior-sed? I dunno, it’s easy to type and remember. It replaces sed and awk in just about every situation where I used to reach for either of those tools.

Pipe in stdin (or a file) and ssed can transform it. It can write the changes to a file, or show the diffs. The README is kept up-to-date, and bun install -g ssed will even install a man page, which is generated (using ssed!) from the source code’s help content. 😳

Enjoy! Or not. It’s mine and I love it but I could care less if anyone else takes the time to learn it enough to see how useful it is.

[G] https://github.com/colinta/ssed