My Ed(1) Toolbox

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Funny thing about ed: While it is still one of my most common commands, it is also my dad's name. So, I've spent my entire career regularly typing my father's name at work.

Ah, ed. Back in the mid 80s, I had to teach a course on Unix & its tools - if I remember correctly it was called "Unix - a modern OS". One of those tools was of course ed. We couldn't use vi because the termcap/terminfo settings were screwed up for the physical serial terminals we had - I eventually fixed this & felt very pleased with myself, as those terminal config files are a b*tch.

Still, teaching bash, C and the usual suspects along with ed was very strenuous for the students, and for me - we only ran the course once.

I like ed but I prefer 'sam -d' (the terminal mode of Sam). It has a nice looping construct 'x' and you can open multiple files and do batch edits (with 'X').

There is a Go port of Sam, which is easy to install:

go install 9fans.net/go/cmd/sam@latest

http://sam.cat-v.org/