[COFF] Kids these days....

[Dan Cross]

On Wed, Feb 12, 2025 at 4:40 PM John Levine <johnl at taugh.com> wrote:
> It appears that Aron Insinga <aki at insinga.com> said:
> >I can't check the size of vi or ex right now (not installed), but ed is
> >*tiny* and starts up very quickly.
>
> On debian ex is vim.tiny whcih is about 1.6M, on FreeBSD it's nvi
> which is about 400K. While those are a lot bigger than ed which is
> about 50K, by current standards they're also tiny and they start up
> faster than you can see.
>
> If you want to edit something and you like ed, ex is a perfectly adequate substitute.

That's rather subjective.

The `ex` command set is very close to `ed`, but subtly different in
(possibly?) annoying ways.  As a trivial example, `q` repeated twice
in `ed` will exit even if the file being edited is not saved; to do so
in `ex` one uses the `vi`-like `q!`.  Maybe that's splitting fine
hairs, but if the desire is for a "muscle-memory" editor in a
constrained environment, that kind of thing can be maddening.

An issue here is that the Internet has never reached the Padlipsky
ideal of resource sharing: under Plan 9, I brought all the resources I
wanted to interact with to me by importing them into some namespace on
my terminal (terminal in the Plan 9 sense, not the VT102 sense), where
I could interact with them using familiar and comfortable tools.  But
that never caught on, and the rest of the world still thinks that
`ssh` is a nifty idea.  Since most of us live in the real world, all
too often we're constrained to remote access environments and whatever
tools they come with.  (Ted: I get it, man; I really do.)

Incidentally, for these pragmatic reasons, I've been playing with the
Helix editor, and I kinda prefer it to vi/vim.  Even though I don't
think that character-mode interfaces are all that cool in 2025, at
least I can confidently say that I have moved boldly into the 1980s.

        - Dan C.

> >On 2/12/25 15:48, John Levine wrote:
> >> It appears that Theodore Ts'o <tytso at mit.edu> said:
> >>> On Tue, Feb 11, 2025 at 09:09:16PM -0500, Norman Wilson wrote:
> >>>> Remind them that ed (pronounced e d) is the standard editor.
> >>> It's annoying for me that many Linux distros install vi/vim as the
> >>> default editor, and not ed --- and I never learned how to use vi, at
> >>> least not fluently.  For me, it's either ed or emacs (or emacs-nox on
> >>> a server/VM), so I have to install ed explicitly after a new install.
> >> On all the unices I know, vi is also called ex, and if you invoke it
> >> as ex, it looks enough like ed to get your editing done.