18 Jan
2020
18 Jan
'20
7:55 a.m.
On Fri, 10 Jan 2020, Steve Nickolas wrote:
On Fri, 10 Jan 2020, Dan Cross wrote:
The 'gnu' version (or maybe just gnu licensed) of pico, cuz there has to
be a 'gnu' licensed of everything :-/
On Fri, Jan 10, 2020 at 10:39 AM Nemo Nusquam
<cym224(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
This is one of the reasons I liked E when I first used it: it was
modal, but it started in edit mode. (Also you KNEW what mode you were
in, which I understand isn't always the case with vi, although it
usually is in the clones iirc?)
In earlier days, my wife was given email by
telnetting to an SGI
system and using elm. One day, I visited her office as she was
composing a message. Intrigued, I asked her what the editor
was. She did not know and pointed to her cheat-sheet listing editor
commands. One was ^X^C to exit-and-send. She is not a programmer
and I was a bit surprised at their choice.
Hmm, I'm actually kind of not. Starting users off with a modal
editor (that starts in command mode, no less!) can be surprising for
novices; with emacs, at least you can start typing text and, well,
see text. I think that one of the smartest things Marc
Crispin ever did was
write `pico` to go with `pine`. A simple editor targeted at the
novice was really useful for casual and/or new users, particularly as
the Internet spread and an account on a Unix system was the default
introduction to email etc for so many.
And I still use nano - which is a rewrite of pico. pico Just Works(R)(TM)(C), and it's not enormous.
nano adds a few things I
like, but the UI is the same. Heck...I still use PINE and am sending this
message from it ;)
I used pine for years, now alpine, fingers are as hard wired for moving
around in it as they are for doing things in vi(m). However, I also
have (al)pine use vi for the message editing. :)
I learned ed a long time ago because I once had some box that would boot
into single-user mode, but not far enough to get any termcap/info stuff
loaded, vi didn't work, ex didn't work, but ed did. Not too long ago, I
used ed to fix a hosed up passwd file via salt... did something like:
sudo salt some-box cmd.run 'printf "1\n/mparson\ns/foo/bar/\nw\nq\n" | ed
/etc/passwd'
I don't remember what exactly was wrong, but it prevented someone from
being able to log in and it wasn't fixable with the 'users' state.
Maybe it was a bad path to root's shell and we couldn't log in on the
console or something. I've slept since then, lost the details.
The guy watching over my shoulder didn't even know what 'ed' was.
--
Michael Parson
Pflugerville, TX
KF5LGQ