[TUHS] Remember the ed thread?

Brantley Coile brantley at coraid.com
Tue Mar 30 01:26:51 AEST 2021


>From 1984, when I stopped using vi (vee eye), until the early 1990's, when
I could use Sam, I used a slightly hacked version of ed. I added
what the Labs called the "b" command. I had use some other character. Dennis
Ritchie sent me a 8th Edition Unix manual, and I saw they had added almost
the same thing and called the command by the second letter. Vi called
it the last letter, "z." 

I've never found ed slows me down. Some things I would have used awk/sed
for that I now use Sam's command window for, but that's a bad thing. I still
use ed a lot along side Sam.


> On Mar 29, 2021, at 11:09 AM, Anders Damsgaard <anders at adamsgaard.dk> wrote:
> 
> * Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> [2021-03-29 07:34:49 -0700]:
> 
>> I had *.clients.your-server.de crawling mcvoy.com in violation of my
>> robots.txt.  For whatever reason, the tty settings (or something)
>> made vi not work, I dunno what the deal is, stty -tabs didn't help.
>> 
>> So I had to resort to ed to write and debug the little program below.
>> It was surprisingly pleasant, it's probably the first time I've used ed
>> for anything real in at least a decade.  My fingers still know it.
>> 
>> +1 for ed.  It's how many decades old and still useful?
> 
> I recently learned ed(1) for the first time (I have a unix beard, but it's
> not grey yet). I found ed to be very efficient and useful for small fixes,
> even on slow connections.  This beginner's tutorial was very helpful
> for me: gopher://katolaz.net/0/ed_tutorial.txt
> 
> (https mirror for non-gopher clients:
> https://adamsgaard.dk/npub/ed_tutorial.txt )



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