Most developers spend their entire careers as an employee. Some delve into the world of consulting. Some freelance. But the majority of us cling to the security of a steady paycheck and, in the US, medical benefits. However, the security is illusory. Companies, from the smallest to the largest, have been laying off employees in record numbers. I’ve been laid off several times in my career, and it’s happened to most, if not all, of my developer friends.

Text Filters

One of the most common, and most useful, types of command line applications is a “filter.” A filter is any application which accepts text as its input, and provides the text, or a modified version of it, as its output. A simple example of this is the sort command.

Example file:

fruit.txt

bananas
kiwis
apples
tomatoes
oranges

> sort fruit.txt
apples
bananas
kiwis
oranges
tomatoes

Filters can do anything you can imagine, including modifying the output. Let’s see a couple examples of the grep command:

Syntax Highlighting

Let’s test out what Hugo is capable of when it comes to syntax highlighting in Markdown…

def main():
    print('hello')

func main(){
    fmt.Println('hello')

SELECT first, last, email FROM users;

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