4 ms·

Arguably, interactive editing with "ed" is an obsolete skill that went out with 110baud mechanical teletypes. However, having a basic idea of "sed" is a goldmi

Arguably, interactive editing with "ed" is an obsolete skill that went out with 110baud mechanical teletypes. However, having a basic idea of "sed" is a goldmine for super-quick command line pipeline kinds of tricks. Even in this day and age.

omoikane 3y ago
ed is still great if I just want to fix a few lines remotely over a terminal. You might say ed is interactive sed :)
- bee_rider 3y ago
  sed and vi both have roots in ed, right? So you only needed one more round of advancement from ed to reach peak computing. I mean we’re all joking in this thread to some extent, but actually, I don’t know that I don’t believe this.
  - omoikane 3y ago
    > sed and vi both have roots in ed A joke I used to tell people is "don't know how to quit vi? Just type Q to enter Ex mode, then you can exit vi just like how you would exit ed."
    - bee_rider 3y ago
      Clearly the solution is :!killall vi or something along those lines.
- alchemist1e9 3y ago
  Ironically I’m studying all the oldest of oldest UNIX utilities that can work well over a pure teletype style terminal, think a LA34 DECwriter IV. No ncurses, no TUI. only line feeds and also ink is scarce. Why? Because we have a new friend in the house who effectively has to interact with the outside world via teletype terminal. The LLMs!
  - bodyfour 3y ago
    A great point, but even over a teletype you'd use "ex", not "ed".
    - alchemist1e9 3y ago
      Totally true! Thank you for reminding me of ex.
- chefandy 3y ago
  Curious: Why would you use ed over ex, or vi for that matter?
  - omoikane 3y ago
    "ed" is easier to type than "ex" but mostly it's a matter of habit. On some systems, /bin/ed is a separate binary but /usr/bin/ex is actually just a symlink to vim, and at that point I might as well run vim. As to why I run "ed" instead of "vi": if I get just a few errors from some script I just copied over, I could run "ed" and the error message is still on the screen (because ed doesn't repaint the whole screen). I would run vi and screen if I expect to fix more than just a few lines.
    - chefandy 3y ago
      makes sense
Voultapher 3y ago
PSA if you use sed with anything but trivial patterns, consider supplying the pattern via file `sed -f script.sed`. Saves you a lot of sanity not having to escape everything in arcane shell + regex escape rules.
bodyfour 3y ago
It remained a valuable skill into the 1990s when many UNIX machines still had a separate /usr partition. Many times I'd have to fix a server with a configuration issue causing /usr to not mount correctly on boot. When you're at a single-user shell and no /usr/bin/vi is available suddenly knowing the basics of /bin/ed becomes very useful. Of course these days most UNIXes moved away from a separate /usr partition so if the root filesystem mounts you have a full-featured vim.
- macintux 3y ago
  ed also was, at least on LPMuds in the 90s, the only online editor. It was a bit crippled, but still recognizably ed.
medoc 3y ago
I used ed on video terminals connected to VME 68000 Unix V7 machines around 1986. For some reason, I don't remember using vi on them, and in any case, ed remained very useful when the terminal type was misconfigured or unknown to the system, which happened quite a lot (I guess that not everything emulated a VT100 at the time). We actually jumped directly from ed to some Emacs relative (Jove probably), which was the beginning of paradise, and then we received our Sun 3 and it was Emacs all the way to present :)
- cylinder714 3y ago
  vi is painful over slow lines, maybe that was it? When I started at SCO in '86 my terminal connected at 9600 baud to a VME 68000 box named "scotty" running Xenix. (All our servers had names containing "sco". Over the years I think we had to settle for just having the letters somewhere in the name.) 9600 baud was luxury after university, where all our terminals connected at 2400 baud.

omoikane 3y ago

ed is still great if I just want to fix a few lines remotely over a terminal. You might say ed is interactive sed :)

bee_rider 3y ago
sed and vi both have roots in ed, right? So you only needed one more round of advancement from ed to reach peak computing. I mean we’re all joking in this thread to some extent, but actually, I don’t know that I don’t believe this.
- omoikane 3y ago
  > sed and vi both have roots in ed A joke I used to tell people is "don't know how to quit vi? Just type Q to enter Ex mode, then you can exit vi just like how you would exit ed."
  - bee_rider 3y ago
    Clearly the solution is :!killall vi or something along those lines.
alchemist1e9 3y ago
Ironically I’m studying all the oldest of oldest UNIX utilities that can work well over a pure teletype style terminal, think a LA34 DECwriter IV. No ncurses, no TUI. only line feeds and also ink is scarce. Why? Because we have a new friend in the house who effectively has to interact with the outside world via teletype terminal. The LLMs!
- bodyfour 3y ago
  A great point, but even over a teletype you'd use "ex", not "ed".
  - alchemist1e9 3y ago
    Totally true! Thank you for reminding me of ex.
chefandy 3y ago
Curious: Why would you use ed over ex, or vi for that matter?
- omoikane 3y ago
  "ed" is easier to type than "ex" but mostly it's a matter of habit. On some systems, /bin/ed is a separate binary but /usr/bin/ex is actually just a symlink to vim, and at that point I might as well run vim. As to why I run "ed" instead of "vi": if I get just a few errors from some script I just copied over, I could run "ed" and the error message is still on the screen (because ed doesn't repaint the whole screen). I would run vi and screen if I expect to fix more than just a few lines.
  - chefandy 3y ago
    makes sense

Voultapher 3y ago

PSA if you use sed with anything but trivial patterns, consider supplying the pattern via file `sed -f script.sed`. Saves you a lot of sanity not having to escape everything in arcane shell + regex escape rules.

bodyfour 3y ago

It remained a valuable skill into the 1990s when many UNIX machines still had a separate /usr partition. Many times I'd have to fix a server with a configuration issue causing /usr to not mount correctly on boot. When you're at a single-user shell and no /usr/bin/vi is available suddenly knowing the basics of /bin/ed becomes very useful. Of course these days most UNIXes moved away from a separate /usr partition so if the root filesystem mounts you have a full-featured vim.

macintux 3y ago
ed also was, at least on LPMuds in the 90s, the only online editor. It was a bit crippled, but still recognizably ed.

medoc 3y ago

I used ed on video terminals connected to VME 68000 Unix V7 machines around 1986. For some reason, I don't remember using vi on them, and in any case, ed remained very useful when the terminal type was misconfigured or unknown to the system, which happened quite a lot (I guess that not everything emulated a VT100 at the time). We actually jumped directly from ed to some Emacs relative (Jove probably), which was the beginning of paradise, and then we received our Sun 3 and it was Emacs all the way to present :)

cylinder714 3y ago
vi is painful over slow lines, maybe that was it? When I started at SCO in '86 my terminal connected at 9600 baud to a VME 68000 box named "scotty" running Xenix. (All our servers had names containing "sco". Over the years I think we had to settle for just having the letters somewhere in the name.) 9600 baud was luxury after university, where all our terminals connected at 2400 baud.