On Tue, 9 Mar 2021 at 15:22, Steffen Nurpmeso <steffen(a)sdaoden.eu> wrote: Indeed. I think many people have been teenagers and been that person in some form or another, but outgrowing a phase of life doesn't mean forgetting or ignoring it. A quick grep through the CSRG CDs revealed that the phrase survived in 32v, as well as in some form of BSDs up to 4.3-Tahoe. mh also had a variant of it (wow, the irony...). -Henry

ed was my goto over any modem, it's very undemanding in terms of characters transferred. Can't tell you how many times I've done ed foo.c /^some_function 20p goto the line c whatever . w q So a lot of use so long as I was using dial up, some continued use when I was doing bring up and the tty driver was all screwed up so you are typing at some slow console. Once performance wasn't an issue, it was vi all the time. I did a year in emacs, never warmed up to it, I know some people love it, I MUCH preferred the way vi works. So back to vi, some time spent in xvi because I was on 4MB main memory Sun machines so I made a version of libc that treated \n like normal libc treats \0, then changed xvi so it used mmap(2) to map the file instead of reading it in and strdup()ing every line. I did that because I was looking at performance logs and the very most I could fit into memory was 1/2 of what I could fit into memory with mmap(). That 2x bigger was a big deal to me, I was in out of those logs all the time. xvi also had buffers, like emacs, you could be looking at 2 files at once or 2 different regions of the same file. Then vim came along and it had everything I wanted and I didn't have to support it so I have been in vim since 1996 (that's the last time the xvi source that I have was touched). If things get wonky, ed still works, which is pleasant. But 99.9% of the time I'm in vim, I'm in it right now, typing this. I still use mutt(1) as my mail reader and I wacked it to drop me into vim. On Wed, Mar 10, 2021 at 09:30:46AM +1100, Rob Pike wrote: -- --- Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm

The phrase disappeared from the manuals at some point. I might have committed the offense myself: The Research Unix manuals all continue the phrase, but the Plan 9 ones say: ED(1) ED(1) NAME ed - text editor SYNOPSIS ed [ - ] [ -o ] [ file ] DESCRIPTION Ed is a venerable text editor. I likely made the "venerable" substitution. I regret that now. Ed is the standard editor. -rob On Wed, Mar 10, 2021 at 10:53 AM Steve Nickolas <usotsuki(a)buric.co> wrote:

On Tue, Mar 09, 2021 at 06:51:56PM -0500, Steve Nickolas wrote: Hi, I'm "about no one". I use ed(1) every once in a while, both the way it was supposed to be used, i.e. interactively, and occasionally scripted on smaller documents. I'm soon 50. Having grown up with computers, and having spent most of my money as a student buying the next bigger and/or faster PC, I find that I nowadays enjoy smaller, slower systems and simpler editors more and more. Getting distracted by syntax highligting, confused by too complicated configurations... There is a certain beauty in the editing language of ed(1). It's minimalistic and restrictive, and therefore forces you to think, to remember, and to be creative. One of my big sorrows is not *having* to deal with ed(1) as a youngster or student, over slow modem links. I think I would appreciate Unix even more now if I had. I was born one or two decades too late. ed(1) is still the standard editor though, and so is ex(1) and vi(1), at least if POSIX is to be believed :-) -- Andreas (Kusalananda) Kähäri SciLifeLab, NBIS, ICM Uppsala University, Sweden .

back to original title - manual humour. my favorite was in the "form" command. -- credit to mcilroy. "If one of the special characters [{]}\ is preceded by a \, it loses its special character." On Wed, Mar 10, 2021 at 11:50 AM Andy Kosela <akosela(a)andykosela.com> wrote:

I Still use ed periodically. Less often, but sometimes. Sometimes, its for nostalgia. It never lasts. The past isn't as rosy as we like to think it was. You have to be very confident you know what your doing, to not wind up saying p a lot, to "see" it. It demands you think. Sometimes, it's for functionality. You kind of know you could do this in sed, but, you aren't 100% sure, ed means you can "look" at some /match lines and then craft the s/pat/repl/ and wq and go home. Thats kind of using p too. Sometimes, it's for expediency. You stuffed up. Nothing else seems to work. This editor works. Hammer, screw.. good enough. Ed can cope with very large data better than some alternatives. Less litter. I hate finding .swp files and vi -r is frankly disgusting. Its indeterminite what it is r(ecovering) from. don't get me started on #file or file~ trash either. I loved ed, and I lived in ed far more than ex/vi until about 1985/6 when something flipped. I think its possible, that vi muscle memory took over, and jove/gosmacs/emacs became too confusing (I had flirted with this but not coding LISP made it silly, I was really only using the keystroke-recording macro to do dirty edits by "yea, same as the last time" tricks) Mike Lesk showed me MGR. I actually got really depressed at that point. I felt like I'd been working under a rock, not understanding what was possible. Sunview kind of also sucked me in, with an emphasis on Sucked because it did. Not really about the editor, but the whole "ok THIS is what efficient looks like" combined with tiling and other things, it just made ed sort-of walk into the background a bit. Hard to focus when you're being offered a vision of 4D hypercube projected onto a 2D surface. I didn't stick on MGR. It was too off-beam of what other people around me were doing. I was asked if I could fix some minor nits in it, thats when I realised I lacked fundamental clue (it is also why I seem to be the only person I know who doesn't totally hate the idea of the google 'be this smart to enter' testing: It obviously DOES work to weed some people out) Socialised aspects of "what editor do you use" can't be under-estimated, for anyone who is essentially using tools not writing them. If you wrote an editor, you probably got to the right place faster. If you use one, you wind up being 10 years in before you ask yourself "how does infinite undo work really" and learn about things like Merkle trees or whatever. Editors do a lot. -G

On 2021-03-09 17:30, Rob Pike wrote: Ed, man! !man, ed. ( Sorry -- I could not resist. N. )