This looks cool! I linked it on my wiki page of alternative shells:

https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/ExternalResources

(which is cited on the first page of the thesis!)

I hope that Oil can a lot of these things in a backward compatible way, but I still have to read it and understand it more.

https://github.com/alecthomas/pawk

It gives you a more readable and concise way to select a colum, split it and sau snip out few characters.