Text utilities handle the manipulation that is tedious by hand: changing case, counting words and characters, removing duplicate lines, sorting, finding and replacing across a large block, comparing two versions, cleaning up whitespace, and converting between Markdown, HTML, and plain text.
They shine on the jobs that fall between a text editor and a script, where writing code would take longer than the task itself. Look for tools that handle large inputs without freezing, preserve unicode and accented characters correctly, and show a live preview so you can confirm the transformation is right before copying the result back out.
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