NimbleText: An Editor, Only Better
I've admitted it before: Regular expressions defeat me.
NimbleText gives me an editor and an "English-like" way of writing templates that will convert a list of data values into something more useful. Under the hood, it uses regular expressions to identify the data to change but I'm insulated from that. NimbleText isn't a Visual Studio add-in so you have to leave Visual Studio to use it, but even with that limitation NimbleText lets you do wonderful things.
NimbleText is relatively user-friendly: It's well-documented and has menus for selecting and inserting NimbleText keywords into your templates (though many of my templates don't need them). More importantly, NimbleText has a library of snippets to help get you started.
This snippet, for instance, integrates NimbleText keywords and JavaScript to generate C# properties from a list of datatypes and property names:
<% $0.toLowerCase() %>private $0 <% $1.toCamelCase() %>;
$ONCE
$EACH
public $0 <% $1.toPascalCase() %> {
get { return <% $1.toCamelCase() %>; }
set { <% $1.toCamelCase() %> = value; }
}
I've also used NimbleText to process text files of data (eliminating duplicate rows, for instance). I can't tell you that the learning curve is zero, but it's pretty darn flat.
Posted by Peter Vogel on 10/02/2014