On Sat, Jul 4, 2020 at 12:33 PM Adam Thornton <athornton@gmail.com> wrote:

The "s" editor is written by Webb Miller and appears in his book "A Software Tools Sampler."

Wow, I never knew about this book, though I know ST and STP well, and used ST on RSX-11/M+ and VAX/VMS for $EMPLOYER in the 1980s. Is the rest of the source code for the book available online anywhere?

Jez Higgins is rewriting the STP tools into modern C++. His blog posts are at <https://www.jezuk.co.uk/tags/software-tools-in-c++.html> and the code is at <https://github.com/jezhiggins/stiX>. He's rewritten the tools in chapters 1 and 2 and part of 3.

Since I find ed thoroughly unpleasant to use, having a screen editor was a must for me to use v7 for any length of time, and s fills that role rather nicely.

Gotcha. I actually like line editors (you can't mung your file so thoroughly with a single stray keystroke), but I'm willing to trade a little standardosity for additional convenience, so I do almost all my editing of prose and programs in `ex`, occasionally dropping into vi-mode for matching open and close markers in Lisp and XML.

John Cowan http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan cowan@ccil.org
If you have ever wondered if you are in hell, it has been said, then
you are on a well-traveled road of spiritual inquiry. If you are
absolutely sure you are in hell, however, then you must be on the Cross
Bronx Expressway. --Alan Feuer, New York Times, 2002-09-20