Mime
Mime is a scripting tool for text processing, inspired by Emacs.
Mime provides an editor-like abstraction for manipulating text files, but in a scripting environment, without an editor. This enables very sophisticated transformations that are easy to do through tools like Emacs Keyboard Macros, but hard to do in code.
- Visit the Getting started page for instructions
- Checkout some examples
- Checkout the Concepts and Reference pages
- Or the code from github.
Design
Mime is designed to be familiar to Emacs users but also easy to learn and use for everyone. A lot of things you can do with Emacs Keyboard Macros can also be done with mime, but mime can also do a lot more than that.
Here are some advantages and disadvantages with using mime over Emacs:
Advantages
- You get reproducibility in evironments where Emacs might not be available.
- The ability to document and check in your code to source control.
- Write text manipulation scripts that are much larger and more complex, than what an Emacs macro can be.
- Faster than an Emacs macros, especially when dealing with complex/unstructured data and for source code transformations.
Disadvantages
- The biggest disadvantage is that mime is not Emacs, and it can never expect to match the amount of features provided by Emacs.
- Not visual, so it is possibly hard to get an intuitive understanding of how to use mime, without a lot of experience using Emacs macros.