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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: September 23rd, 2023

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  • I made a serious attempt at using ed(1) for a few weeks. Read the book by Michael Lucas and everything. In the end, I kind of do want to see the file I’m editing, etc. But, some features, or lack of features, stuck with me. Do I need a menu item to count words in the file? That’s why we have wc -w after all. This can be said about a lot of functionality built into editors. It made me really appreciate the idea of programs that do one thing, and can be combined. But yes, in the end it was too much for me, mostly because I’m not good enough with coreutils.





  • It’s a text editor. It all began with the ed editor, which is very simple and does one thing, it edits files. Then someone extended it into the ex editor. Then someone added a new feature: being able to visually see the file you’re editing, which became vi, the visual editor. Then someone improved that, into vim. What began as an editor where you needed to be fluent in regular expressions but otherwise was simple, is now a very complex editor, moving the functionality of the old UNIX tools into the editor itself.