12 Feb
2025
12 Feb
'25
10:38 p.m.
On Wednesday, February 12th, 2025 at 2:13 PM, Dan Cross <crossd(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Wed, Feb 12, 2025 at 4:40 PM John Levine
johnl(a)taugh.com wrote:
I made a fool of myself in the not too distant past regarding ed. I wasn't
aware of the "ed is the standard UNIX text editor" meme and in earnest opened an
issue on the Manjaro GitLab concerning the lack of ed in the base install.
Context was I had just gotten a Pinebook Pro, which has Manjaro by default, and
was doing some initial setup stuff when I found that ed simply wasn't there.
I thought to myself, gee, that's been around since the beginning and is still in
the POSIX standard, perhaps I'm doing something helpful by pointing it out to
the Manjaro folks. Needless to say the ticket was swiftly locked and I found
myself unable to open new issues with them. I in all honesty didn't realize I
was treading into such laughable territory and thought I was genuinely pointing
out a missing piece in their UNIX-like operating system offering. Now all the
wiser and admittedly still feel silly that it isn't there...but the existence of
this whole thing as a meme I believe has really only served to guarantee that
any feedback in any project requesting that ed be installed by default is only
ever seen as being an internet troll, no matter what references one cites...
I for one like the idea that I can drop into something called a "UNIX-like" and
follow tutorials like "UNIX for Beginners" without having to install a bunch of
stuff...but less and less folks use these systems "like UNIX" these days so
can't say I'm too surprised. All the more reason I forego a packaged distro
on my daily driver.
- Matt G.
It appears that Aron Insinga aki(a)insinga.com
said:
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(a)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. 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.