Ed doubters might find this episode of Lambda Island enlightening (and fun): https://lambdaisland.com/episodes/ultimate-dev-setup
Ed is the standard text editor (2014)
81–90 of 125 posts
Re: Ed is the standard text editor (2014)
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
That video is marvellous, when you compare it to today's technology and how it's used. The angsty "does it mean we'll all have to learn to type?", the female BASIC programmer working from home on her terminal with printer as a display. Great stuff.
Yeah, I'm kinda getting into these vids from the seventies and eighties. “Introducing The Amazing Compact Disc, 1982” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Tx6TYnPat8 — “You can pick it up and move around, even shake, and nothing happens”, yeah sure bud. “Introduction to Microsoft Excel, 1992” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOO31qFmi9A “Susan Kare explains Macintosh UI ergonomics on the Computer Chronicles, 1984” https:/…
The Macintosh UI one is gorgeous. Such simple systems. I wished our computers, or maybe just our phones, would be so simple and non-distracting still.
Re: Ed is the standard text editor (2014)
#83The humorous part of this is from 1991.
Re: Ed is the standard text editor (2014)
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
This enlightens me as to how people can code with ed (and why Ken Thompson famously said 'I don't want to see the state of the file when I'm editing.'). It's basically a REPL for writing code. Same as psql, the commands you use to view the state of the text (database) are different from the commands you use to edit the state of the text (database). Still sucks though. Even in psql I regularly drop into vim with \e to…
Just keep it in your head. ed must have been a decent upgrade from punched cards.
As a line editor, it’s pretty much editing a deck of punch cards.
This metaphor, BTW, persists on a lot of mainframe related tasks where, while you see lines on a screen, the computer is reasoning about punch cards.
Re: Ed is the standard text editor (2014)
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have any good resources for these OSs?
Someone used to host a TOPS-20 emulator online, but I can no longer find it.. (these days there should be DEC-20 in the web-browser). Anyway, here are some links: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/dec20.html https://www.livingcomputers.org/Computer-Collection/Online-S... TOPS-20 was really nice.
Re: Ed is the standard text editor (2014)
#86Earlier 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.
Why not use sed?
Re: Ed is the standard text editor (2014)
#87For 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…
Many BASIC interpreters worked exactly like that. On a TRS-80, for instance, you would type your program and, when you needed to edit a line, you’d use the “edit” command with a line number as the argument and drop into a line editor.
Re: Ed is the standard text editor (2014)
#88See also: Rob Pike's sam editor for Plan 9:
http://sam.cat-v.org/
Less commands and a language where "everything is a (huge) string". So its operations are not limited to lines like in ed. A tutorial of the command language: http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/sam_lang_tutorial/sam_tut.pdf
And Pike's introductory paper: http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/sam/
All in all, the terseness of the language can be quite addictive. :) http://sam.cat-v.org/cheatsheet/
Re: Ed is the standard text editor (2014)
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a neat way to think of it. Coming from the other direction, for emacs users, using the command line is like using the editor since the gnu readline lib offers keyboard navigation like emacs.
Except ^W performs a completely different action. I can't count the number of times after switching from a terminal to Emacs within a couple of seconds, my muscle memory still not updated, I hit ^W only to discover I've just deleted 3/4 of the file.
There is a solution to your problem: M-x shell
Re: Ed is the standard text editor (2014)
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, I'm kinda getting into these vids from the seventies and eighties. “Introducing The Amazing Compact Disc, 1982” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Tx6TYnPat8 — “You can pick it up and move around, even shake, and nothing happens”, yeah sure bud. “Introduction to Microsoft Excel, 1992” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOO31qFmi9A “Susan Kare explains Macintosh UI ergonomics on the Computer Chronicles, 1984” https:/…
The Macintosh UI one is gorgeous. Such simple systems. I wished our computers, or maybe just our phones, would be so simple and non-distracting still.