By Hand

adv. 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.