4 ms·
People once coded in ed and it is kinda like coding blind. You don't have a display, instead you can move to specific line numbers and print or replace them. It
by Klockan 9y ago
People once coded in ed and it is kinda like coding blind. You don't have a display, instead you can move to specific line numbers and print or replace them. It sounds impossible at first but you get used to it if you only use ed.
- zokier 9y agoI've been thinking that doing a "30 day command-line challenge" might be cool, idea being that you'd be limited to command-line based tools only. No fancy visual editors or ncurses browsers. Just pure line-oriented bliss (or more likely, hell). ex would be likely candidate for text editor in such experiment.
- nerdponx 9y agoWhat options even exist outside of ex in that case?
- yorwba 9y agoIf you want something even more bare-bones than ex or ed, you could use cat as a write-only editor. In combination with head and tail, replacing parts of a file would be possible as well.
- yjftsjthsd-h 9y agoOr sed, which for many editing purposes is probably easier to use.
- yorwba 9y agoSure, but sed is basically just ed in non-interactive mode, so not very different from ex. And ex on my system is basically just vim without instant redraw after each change. And then you're back in terminal-GUI land. It's interesting how the ancestors of modern editors are still around as living fossils ...
- nerdponx 9y agoI suppose you could also use TECO: http://almy.us/teco.html http://almy.us/teco.html