9 Jul
2018
9 Jul
'18
9:25 a.m.
On 07/08/2018 07:56 PM, Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote:
I never used Unix on teletypes; when I was using an
ASR-35 and a KSR-33
teletype, it was connected to a PDP-8/i and PDP-15/30, although both
did have a line editor that was very similar to /bin/ed. (This is why
to this day if I'm on a slow link or am running in a reduced rescue
environment, I fall back to /bin/ed, not /bin/vi --- my finger macros
are more efficient using /bin/ed than /bin/vi.)
Please forgive my assumption and ignorance. What OS ran on the PDP-8/i
or PDP-15/30?
I fully get falling back to old habits that work well, especially in a
constrained environment.
At least for me, the huge difference that made a
difference to how I
would use a computer primarily had to do with speed that could be sent
from a computer. So even when using a glass tty, if there was 300 or
1200 bps modem between me and the computer, I would be much more likely
to use editor scripts --- and certainly, I'd be much more likely to use
a line editor than anything curses-oriented, whether it's vim or emacs.
Doing different things based on the (lack of) speed of the connection
makes complete sense.
I'd also be much more thoughtful about figuring
out how to carefully
do a global search and replace in a way that wouldn't accidentally
make the wrong change. Forcing myself to think for a minute or two
about how do clever global search and replaces was well worth it when
there was a super-thin pipe between me and the computer. These days,
I'll just use emacs's query-replace, which will allow me to approve each
change in context, either for each change, or once I'm confident that I
got the simple-search-and-replace, or regexp-search-and-replace right,
have it do the rest of the changes w/o approval.
In light of the (lack of) speed aspect above, that seems perfectly
reasonable.
I too do something similar in vi(m) as far as confirming some changes as
I gain trust that they are doing the proper thing.
It's not what you *can't* do with a
glass-tty. It's just that with a
glass-tty, I'm much more likely to rely on incremental searches of my
bash command-line history to execute previous commands, possibly with
some changes, because it's more convenient than firing up an editor and
creating a shell script.
ACK
But there have been times, even recently, when
I've been stuck behind a
slow link (say, because of a crappy hotel network), where I'll find myself
reverting, at least partially, to my old teletype / 1200 modem habits.
Fair.
Will you please elaborate on what you mean by "editor scripts"? That's
a term that I'm not familiar with. — I didn't see an answer to this
question, so I'm asking again.
--
Grant. . . .
unix || die