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like vi, ed is a tool that everyone should know how to use. If your system is well and truly FUBAR, to the point that all but /sbin is gone, and termcap's missi

like vi, ed is a tool that everyone should know how to use. If your system is well and truly FUBAR, to the point that all but /sbin is gone, and termcap's missing, you need to know how ed works. But even kt himself has given up on using ed for the day-to-day (he uses sam, which is probably what vi should have been...), so it's clear its popularity has waned over the years. I myself would rather emacs any day. As for acme, I never got on with it. It's too graphical for my tastes: call me old-fashioned, but I like to have my finger on the keyboard when I edit (sam in a tiled wm is about as far as I'll stray in that direction). OTOH, it does have some really cool features... However, we Emacs users don't get jealous of features: we steal them... grins evilly

viraptor 10y ago
> If your system is well and truly FUBAR, to the point that all but /sbin is gone, and termcap's missing, you need to know how ed works. I would agree with this a 10+ years ago, but I think we created better technologies since. I'd rather say that if your system is so broken you should know how to 1) snapshot it for analysis, 2) replace from original image, or orchestration. Using ed may be fun, but why not just move the snapshot to a working system instead? And apart from massive filesystem corruption, why would we ever lose /sbin in production in the first place?
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  No, not sbin, your shared libraries, and/or termcap. Those are easily loseable, especially if /usr, /share, or /lib are on a separate partition. Although yes, it's not the problem it used to be.