I spend so much time in a text editor, its hard to get my head around a word processor sometimes. Text and formatting at the same time?
Moving some content around I found myself with a ton of links formatted in an unordered list. I only needed the plaintext of the name and link separate for the current project. My trusty BBEdit with Grep search and replace support yield the following search and replacement patterns to make quick work of the list.
Search Grep Pattern
<li><a href="(.*)">(.*)<\/a> ?<strong> ?\((.*)\)<\/strong><\/li>
Replace Grep Pattern
Turned this
<li><a href="http://www.agentb.com/">AgentB</a> <strong> (Deals)</strong></li>
into this
AgentB (Deals)
http://www.agentb.com/
I always keep an empty BBedit window for text processing like this. Its easy to paste a chunk of text, process it and then paste it back into your word processor.
Note:
I’m almost good enough at Grep search patterns to make this viable in all situations. It used to take me 5 minutes to debug and expression that would have taken 2 minutes to cut and paste manually. I had this one whipped out in much less time than it would have taken to manually cut and paste a hundred of these.
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I found Todo.txt by Gina Trapani, randomly last weekend and have been playing with it all week. Todo.txt is a todo list written in shell script. It should run fine under any system that supports a Unix like shell… Linux, OS X, Cygwin etc.
At any given time I have a half dozen post-it pads going with todo lists, usually the things that have to get done TODAY! Todo.txt is so simple to use I’ve misplaced most of my post-it pads (still need paper for the grocery list). 
Some examples:
todo.sh add This is my first task
todo.sh list
02 Another task
01 This is my first task
--
TODO: 2 tasks in /Users/damonp/etc/todo.txt.
Set task number one to the highest priority, A.
todo.sh pri 1 A
todo.sh list
01 (A) This is my first task
02 Another task
--
TODO: 2 tasks in /Users/damonp/etc/todo.txt.
I haven’t gotten much further than adding, prioritizing and marking off items, but the builtin help shows options for archiving, reporting, appending, prepending and deleting items.
Popularity: 1%
