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Comment by omoikane | Hacker News Reader

ed is still great if I just want to fix a few lines remotely over a terminal. You might say ed is interactive sed :)

Ironically I’m studying all the oldest of oldest UNIX utilities that can work well over a pure teletype style terminal, think a LA34 DECwriter IV. No ncurses, no TUI. only line feeds and also ink is scarce.

Why? Because we have a new friend in the house who effectively has to interact with the outside world via teletype terminal.

The LLMs!

A great point, but even over a teletype you'd use "ex", not "ed".

Totally true! Thank you for reminding me of ex.

Curious: Why would you use ed over ex, or vi for that matter?

"ed" is easier to type than "ex" but mostly it's a matter of habit. On some systems, /bin/ed is a separate binary but /usr/bin/ex is actually just a symlink to vim, and at that point I might as well run vim.

As to why I run "ed" instead of "vi": if I get just a few errors from some script I just copied over, I could run "ed" and the error message is still on the screen (because ed doesn't repaint the whole screen). I would run vi and screen if I expect to fix more than just a few lines.

makes sense

sed and vi both have roots in ed, right? So you only needed one more round of advancement from ed to reach peak computing.

I mean we’re all joking in this thread to some extent, but actually, I don’t know that I don’t believe this.

> sed and vi both have roots in ed

A joke I used to tell people is "don't know how to quit vi? Just type Q to enter Ex mode, then you can exit vi just like how you would exit ed."

Clearly the solution is :!killall vi or something along those lines.

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