eds.activemath.org

Skype has always appeared to me as the real end-user application… something you have to accept to reach certain users. It’s nicely designed but it’s too proprietary.

But hold on, Skype actually tried a standard… sed!

Sed is this old command-line tool that Unix command-line hackers use to create pipelines of text-transformation. It has a very cryptic language but, combined with some other, has a huge power.

Basically in skype chat you can modify your last post if no-one else posted using the syntax “s/source/target/”. Typically, that helps to modify errors but it can really surprise the chat-members.

Such power was, to my knowledge, only available in sed or in very advanced IRC tools such as Scribe.