by hand
1. Said of an operation (especially a repetitive, trivial,
and/or tedious one) that ought to be performed automatically
by the computer, but which a hacker instead has to step
tediously through. "My mailer doesn't have a command to
include the text of the message I'm replying to, so I have to
do it by hand." This does not necessarily mean the speaker
has to retype a copy of the message; it might refer to, say,
dropping into a subshell from the mailer, making a copy of
one's mailbox file, reading that into an editor, locating the
top and bottom of the message in question, deleting the rest
of the file, inserting ">" characters on each line, writing
the file, leaving the editor, returning to the mailer, reading
the file in, and later remembering to delete the file.
Compare {eyeball search}.
2. By extension, writing code which does something in an
explicit or low-level way for which a presupplied library
routine ought to have been available. "This cretinous
{B-tree} library doesn't supply a decent iterator, so I'm
having to walk the trees by hand."
[{Jargon File}]