cat (i.e concatenate and print files)

I have used cat and most likely you have too, although my usage has mostly been limited to viewing files in the terminal, such as taking a glance at packages listed in a package.json or reading a .env file. The command has a lot of options, such as numbering lines, removing empty lines, etc. Take a look at some of them below and use the man pages to further explore.

The special case which inspired this post is in the DESCRIPTION above:

The cat utility reads files sequentially, writing them to the standard output. The file operands are processed in command-line order. If file is a single dash (‘-’) or absent, cat reads from the standard input.

cat can also read from standard input (STDIN), i.e keyboard input in our terminal. This means that it will regurgitate any input we enter back to the console if we don't supply a file to it from which to read.

Where's the editor part then? Well, instead of having cat writing out input to STDOUT (console), we can redirect the output to a file.

A small caveat is that "editor" is somewhat of a misnomer here as while the program is running you do not have functionalities like editing or going back to a previous line, syntax highlighting, etc. This is sufficient enough in cases like above where one is maybe writing or appending to a todo-list, .gitignore, .env, etc. I have found this to be slightly more efficient than using vim to open/create, insert, save, and exit, or using echo with multi-line text requiring enclosing strings.

I am going to be using this for a while and see if it sticks for the use cases above or any new one I discover.