Using sed to make indexes for books (long)

A dusty 1997 note about building a book index with sed — one of those old-school text tools beloved by command-line diehards — somehow turned into a mini culture-war in the comments. The original post is wonderfully nerdy: a publishing worker explains how volunteers typed in index terms and page numbers, then used sorting tricks and a short script to turn a messy list into a clean, print-ready index. It’s the kind of thing that feels half practical guide, half time capsule from the early web.

But the real juice is in the reaction. One camp got instantly nostalgic, with commenter janandonly lamenting that tools like AWK, SED, GREP and Bash are fading from everyday life and mostly survive in places like Hacker News. That sparked the classic mood of tech commenters mourning lost craftsmanship while also admitting, hilariously, that they now ask large language models — basically AI assistants — to write these scripts for them. So yes: the old wizard tools are being kept alive by robots. You can almost hear the irony clanging.

Then came the practical counterpunch: janandonly also casually dropped that they made a book index in Microsoft Word and it was “basically pretty easy,” which is exactly the sort of sentence that can make command-line purists stare into the middle distance. Meanwhile, tomhow arrived with the receipt that this very post already made the rounds on Hacker News back in 2018, adding a touch of “we’re doing retro discourse about retro tools now.” The vibe? Equal parts admiration, nostalgia, and gentle comedy about how technology keeps changing while nerd arguments stay exactly the same.