4 ms·

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