2. Textpad is magic

First things first: computers need software.

We tend to think that complex processes require complex software. That's our general experience: Photoshop will do a better job of manipulating your pictures than the free little Paint application that comes with Windows will.

The rule, however, doesn't always hold true. To use regular expressions, you do not need a whizz-bang piece of software. In fact, the less whizzing and the fewer bangs the better. What you need is something stripped down to bare bones.

The reason is this: control. If you are using regexes, you never, ever want the computer to second guess you. This is an environment where you want hte computer to do exactly as it's told, no more, no less. Enter the text editor.

Text editors do just that: they edit text. They don't format, they don't (usually) do fonts. MS Word is not a text editor. (Anyone who has been annoyed by Word trying to predict their formatting or telling them their grammar is bad will already understand the 'control' advantage of slimmed-down software.) As a rule, programmers don't use fancy software - most of them use text editors.

There are a lot of text editors out there, all of which are good for different things (usually programming related). For metadata manipulation, however, there's only one even worth looking at: Textpad. It's cheap, it's fast, it's reliable, and it handles metadata impeccably. And as you can see, it doesn't even look scary - the layout is just like a slimmer version of Word.

www.textpad.com

Unfortunately, Textpad is only made for PCs - I don't know any viable alternative for Macs, but if you do, please let me know!

This blog is written specifically for textpad users. You'll find following it very difficult if you don't have a copy.