I’m mostly happy with awk. But splitting strings really sucks. I have to read the docs every time.

I think my dream awk-like tool would look something like:

1. Has an “interactive” mode to see what your script is doing as you write it. Something like a combination of less, fzf, and a Bret Victor style debugger showing matches/values of variables at each line

2. Supports things that aren’t list RS-separated records of of FS-separated fields. Some formats I would like are json, csv, records where the fields are all key=value, and maybe some other formats. Support would mean some way to specify patterns for different formats

3. Extracting marching groups from regex matches.