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People make fun of ed, but the command line is basically ed with the ability to execute.
But in the past you may have got just some naked Bourne Shell with no defaults at all.
https://docstore.mik.ua/orelly/unix3/upt/ch30_14.htm explains a bit.
They don't make books like this anymore. ;)
There's no reason to use ed. It's a historical novelty at this point. Move on.
> no reason
This is like saying "There is no reason to use UNIX (now that we have Ubuntu, Gnome, and Wayland)." Personally, I tend to stick with the CLI for as long as it gets me where I need.
There's no reason to use ed. It's a historical novelty at this point. Move on.
(And then install Emacs and turn off the screen candy fluff they've added over the last 25-30 years).
The last edit was in 2014? Who's worried about 2400 baud modems and terminals not having cursor positioning capabilities? It's 2022, not 1992! Is there some operating environment I'm not aware of?
The answer to this question is always yes. In this case for example: plenty of old control devices in industrial settings are still operating and use this bitrate.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"oh no i reinstalled the os on my vps and now ssh has it on good authority (said authority is line 68) that someone is doing something nasty" ed .ssh/config 68d wq done, didnt fill my terminal with vim or emacs, didnt tab over to my gui editor then back again also it's a nicely "semantic"/compact/comprehensible way of expressing patches in things like portfiles or nix expressions: postPatch = '' ed Makefile etc etc s…
> ed .ssh/config I think this is my ed use-case as well. I've noticed I need to "apt-get install ed" sometimes. The standard editor is not always standard, it seems.
one of these days i will go around pestering distro release engineers to include it; after all, it's less heavyweight than any one of their homespun lightdm greeters
With 512K of RAM on a 6MHz 80286, using an editor that fit into one "segment" and loaded quickly from a floppy was nice. The original DOS 1.0 edlin was just over 2K.
Of course, we had printed manuals back then, and you could learn EDLIN with the manual on your lap while you typed commands.
For some reason it took me years to understand the need for a line editor. It didn't make any sense in my head. Then one day I saw the famous picture of Bill and Allen as kids in front of a teletype [1] and it finally clicked. The way it worked was like this: As you keyed in your program, letter by letter, it was printed out on the paper immediately like a typewriter. If you ran the program and there was a problem, y…
I heard that a lot of people preferred fewer files and longer functions for the same reason--it was all there on the fanfold output and could be read at once, rather than working in 80x25 chunks. After that mode of working was replaced by interactive programming at the display terminal, we started to prefer functions that didn't span more than 1-2 screens.
People make fun of ed, but the command line is basically ed with the ability to execute.