"vi". Editing with "cat" is
possible but not very useful. I am not going
to learn "ed".
Why?
Simply because. Because I do not like ed.
I want to have useful and user friendly system. To use ed, only because
it is the oldest editor, does not make any sense for me.
I appreciate ed, because of sed, because sed has some similarity to ed
and is extremely useful as a tool.
Unix is not about ed, Unix is about unlimited possibilities of adding
new software , new applications or new editors, it makes Unix beautiful
that it can develop and not editor ed.If ed were all Unix has, it would
not survive.
I hope You accept that someone else can have different favourite
editors. I prefer vi, or even more vim, which is perfect editor.Of
course in the case of emulator missing user friendly editor is not a
problem, because I can edit under Coherent and then build under
emulator.It is good to have a choice, and Unix offers it.
In 1983 I was using vi. I allowed a friend to use our system to typeset
his companies UNIX manuals, and quickly found that I was having to
share the machine with a dozen troff jobs. Vi, being a program that
ran in raw mode, didn't respond very well on that 68010 10Mhz system.
I was forced to switch to ed. Suddenly I discovered that I had hidden
real UNIX behind all those vi commands. I now had plenty of
mental capacity to use the rest of the tools available.
To really say you understand the spirit of the software tools approach,
you must spend a couple of months just using ed. Today I use acme
mostly, but still find myself using ed for some edits.
I would really encourage you to give it a try. Spend two months
just using ed. You cerntainly should use the editor you feel most
confortable with, but the growing experience will be well worth your while.
Brantley
