ED IS THE STANDARD TEXT EDITOR

From: patl@athena.mit.edu (Patrick J. LoPresti)
Subject: The True Path (long)
Date: 11 Jul 91 03:17:31 GMT
Newsgroups: alt.religion.emacs,alt.slack

When I log into my Xenix system with my 110 baud teletype, both vi
*and* Emacs are just too damn slow. They print useless messages like,
'C-h for help' and '"foo" File is read only'. So I use the editor
that doesn't waste my VALUABLE time.

Ed, man! !man ed

ED(1) UNIX Programmer's Manual ED(1)

NAME
ed - text editor

SYNOPSIS
ed [ - ] [ -x ] [ name ]
DESCRIPTION
Ed is the standard text editor.
---

Computer Scientists love ed, not just because it comes first
alphabetically, but because it's the standard. Everyone else loves ed
because it's ED!

"Ed is the standard text editor."

And ed doesn't waste space on my Timex Sinclair. Just look:

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root 24 Oct 29 1929 /bin/ed
-rwxr-xr-t 4 root 1310720 Jan 1 1970 /usr/ucb/vi
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root 5.89824e37 Oct 22 1990 /usr/bin/emacs

Of course, on the system *I* administrate, vi is symlinked to ed.
Emacs has been replaced by a shell script which 1) Generates a syslog
message at level LOG_EMERG; 2) reduces the user's disk quota by 100K;
and 3) RUNS ED!!!!!!

"Ed is the standard text editor."

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.

"Ed is the standard text editor."

Ed, the greatest WYGIWYG editor of all.

ED IS THE TRUE PATH TO NIRVANA! ED HAS BEEN THE CHOICE OF EDUCATED
AND IGNORANT ALIKE FOR CENTURIES! ED WILL NOT CORRUPT YOUR PRECIOUS
BODILY FLUIDS!! ED IS THE STANDARD TEXT EDITOR! ED MAKES THE SUN
SHINE AND THE BIRDS SING AND THE GRASS GREEN!!

When I use an editor, I don't want eight extra KILOBYTES of worthless
help screens and cursor positioning code! I just want an EDitor!!
Not a "viitor". Not a "emacsitor". Those aren't even WORDS!!!! ED!
ED! ED IS THE STANDARD!!!

TEXT EDITOR.

When IBM, in its ever-present omnipotence, needed to base their
"edlin" on a UNIX standard, did they mimic vi? No. Emacs? Surely
you jest. They chose the most karmic editor of all. The standard.

Ed is for those who can *remember* what they are working on. If you
are an idiot, you should use Emacs. If you are an Emacs, you should
not be vi. If you use ED, you are on THE PATH TO REDEMPTION. THE
SO-CALLED "VISUAL" EDITORS HAVE BEEN PLACED HERE BY ED TO TEMPT THE
FAITHLESS. DO NOT GIVE IN!!! THE MIGHTY ED HAS SPOKEN!!!

?

The editor was originally written in PDP-11/20 assembler in 1971 by Ken Thompson. Many features of ed came from the qed from his alma mater University of California at Berkeley[3] Thompson was very familiar with qed, and had reimplemented it on the CTSS and Multics systems. His versions of qed were the first to implement regular expressions. Although regular expressions are part of ed, their implementation is considerably less general than that in qed.

Aspects of ed went on to influence ex, which in turn spawned vi. The non-interactive Unix command grep was inspired by a common special uses of qed and later ed, where the command g/re/p means globally search for the regular expression re and print the lines containing it. The Unix stream editor, sed implemented many of the scripting features of qed that were not supported by ed on Unix. In turn sed influenced the design of the programming language AWK – which inspired aspects of Perl.

jesus fucking christ ed has quite the history

i did it

i conquered ed

the truest text editor is one that lets you type text

the commands are ctrl s ctrl n and ctrl o and o allows you to type the file location

i should make that in assembly and see how hard it is

ozzie freedom wrote:the truest text editor is one that lets you type text

the commands are ctrl s ctrl n and ctrl o and o allows you to type the file location

i should make that in assembly and see how hard it is

cat is the most simple text editor ever, no question

there are no shortcuts in the first place

in order to open a file you enter cat > file, to append text to the end of an existing file you go cat >> file (> overwrites)

you can type some letters and then to exit the program and save it you use whatever shortcut **your shell** uses to destroy a task (usually ctrl+d)

cat isn't intended to be a text editor but because of how bourne shell works it's completely capable of it