Actually using Ed

That's cheating!

My bad. I just assumed he skimmed the article as I often do.

Either way, thanks for the article. I've considered my grip on native Unix tools to be a weakness, but there's generally not much good intro material like this.

I'm glad ed is there. I'm glad articles like this are there. But there is no way I'll have retained that article in the moment my terminal has borked and I actually need ed. I wish that something like this available in the man pages, or something like them, or at least referred to in them.

Because maybe I'm not clever enough but I don't find the man page articles to be very good introductions. As reminders of syntax and options and functionality they're great, but I don't find them useful as orientations to how the various utilities work. They are short on examples and demonstrations, which are often the quickest orientations to the basic operation of a tool.

The info tool is sometimes better but not so frequently I'm accustomed to using it. On Ubuntu 'info ed' actually looks pretty good from an example standpoint. But 'info awk' looks like a copy of the man page. And 'info vi' offers a discussion of the emacs vi emulator, about which vi enthusiasts can only mutter "well played".

It would be nice if there were a 'tutorial' command (or 'dontpanic' or 'towel') which gave a brief orientation to how these tools actually worked, with examples and demos, and then some lead into resources on the host (man pages, info, help available within the particular tool) and on the web and elsewhere.

I guess I'll date myself by saying that when I started studying CS, I used ed and thought nothing of writing programming assignments with it. It seemed totally natural. I recall a typical sequence of writing a few lines and then printing out a block of lines to the screen to check. Then jumping somewhere else printing out a block of lines, editing some more etc. I recall hearing about vi and thinking it was overly complex and obviously wouldn't have worked on the hard-copy terminals (really, hard-copy terminals - no screen!) that were scattered about the lab. I don't think I could have conceived of eclipse...

My favorite:

Let's look at a typical novice's session with the mighty ed:

  golem> ed

  ?
  help
  ?
  ?
  ?
  quit
  ?
  exit
  ?
  bye
  ?
  hello? 
  ?
  eat flaming death
  ?
  ^C
  ?
  ^C
  ?
  ^D
  ?

  ---
  Note the consistent user interface and error reportage.  Ed is
  generous enough to flag errors, yet prudent enough not to overwhelm
  the novice with verbosity.

If anyone's interested, a while back I put together a table of commands available in various versions of ed, from 1st edition UNIX up to POSIX, as well as sam. It's largely academic, but I did find it interesting how features crept in.

http://lubutu.com/misc/ed-languages