Hacker News Reader

Comment by ksenzee | Hacker News Reader

There is _still_ no other word processor I'm aware of that can properly convert to title case. Not to mention Reveal Codes. I... might actually use this, not just play with it.

View on HN

I was a computer labs staffer in the early 90s, and for a lot of students our labs were their first exposure to word processors, and man, I hated supporting WordPerfect for DOS. Students couldn't figure out how to apply formatting correctly. Trying to change something's format, they would would reveal codes and delete half of a formatting code pair. I spent so much time explaining why half their paper was now in italics or bold.

WYSIWYG works so much better for most people.

"this sure is a great circular saw"

"table knives work so much better for most people"

> There is _still_ no other word processor I'm aware of that can properly convert to title case. Not to mention Reveal Codes. I... might actually use this, not just play with it.

Like this?

http://aitech.ac.jp/~ckelly/midi/help/caps.html

Yep. They're complicated rules to memorize but you can definitely reduce them to an algorithm.

Equation editor and outlines with 'move family' type functionality as well. Those are not exclusive features but interesting for a terminal application.

vim: select your text, press the ~ key until you get the case you want ..

> until you get the case you want

The GP was talking about a particular type of formatting:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_case

Yeah, I love vim, but that’s not its forte

    : help case

To turn one line into title caps, make every first letter of a word uppercase:

    :s/\v<(.)(\w*)/\u\1\L\2/g

That's not title case - you don't capitalize words such as a, the, of, etc. unless they are at the beginning of the title.

> That's not title case - you don't capitalize words such as a, the, of, etc. unless they are at the beginning of the title.

Exactly. Capitalizing every letter is the lazy, half-ass pseudo title case that I always have to correct. Unfortunately its becoming normalized because many major companies that should know better don't even bother to do it right.

You could also use the vim :%!python3 your_script.py (where your_script.py does the work to format the text) command that takes the text of the buffer as stdin to the script and replaces the buffer contents with stdout of the script. This can also be combined with visual mode linewise to only replace specific lines of the buffer (must work on entire lines selected).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com