3 ms·
On line-editors, it is bit funny that even the most hard-core cli enthusiastics draw the line there and use some sort of visual editor despite line editors bein
by zokier 3y ago
On line-editors, it is bit funny that even the most hard-core cli enthusiastics draw the line there and use some sort of visual editor despite line editors being more pure cli thing. Has anyone seen anyone do any non-trivial coding or other work with line-editors?
I imagine that the code editing experience for blind people might be somewhat comparable to using line-editors? Although especially with hard copy terminals you don't need to keep everything in your head
- varjag 3y agoIf you programmed BASIC (or for that matter other languages) on micros in 1980s, line editors were prevalent.
- quickthrower2 3y agoThe bbcbasic list, ren, auto commands and copy key were very beginner friendly line editors. Super easy to grok.
- anthk 3y agoUnix and ed for sure, before they wrote ex and vi.
- mastax 3y agoI remember a post on here a while ago arguing for using ed. I think it was mostly about scripting contexts and batch processing, not interactive editing.
- rwmj 3y agoI use 'sed' most days.
- xorcist 3y agoI doubt many "hard-core cli enthusiasts" desire some sort of digital self flagellation, but instead strive for efficiency. Full screen editors are efficient, and was very quickly adopted when made available. Line editors prevailed for a long time, not because of user preferences but because they were tiny and was shipped by default. In PC-DOS/MS-DOS edlin.com/exe was what was available until the full screen editor edit.exe shipped some years into the 90s. Almost all home computers came with a variant of BASIC in ROM, which also used line editing (not even with a proper editor but by substitution of whole lines).
- jhallenworld 3y agoI used line editors in the mid 80s on old-at-the-time systems. Some editors supported both line and screen modes, but we didn't have the more expensive terminal which would have allowed screen mode (there were a class of glass ttys with no cursor positioning commands available). It's pretty easy to get used to line editors, you get used to using the search command to position the cursor on the correct line and change command to modify it. Some friendly line editors include DEC's EDI and EDT (PDP-11) and E (Motorola Exorciser). UNIX ed is nice in that it has has regex support, but I don't like its side effects- that p, l and i change the cursor line. I had no use for edlin since screen editors were available on the IBM PC. I tried but never got used to TECO: this is like a screen editor, but no screen: meaning the cursor could be anywhere in the file, including in the middle of a line and it's up to you remember where it is. Some TECOs had a screen mode where it would show you the buffer and cursor position in one window, but accepted normal TECO commands in a separate command window ("TVI" on TOPS-20 worked like this, EMACS was a TECO extension).