Kevin Sivits wrote:
> Vi and emacs both suck. Text editors are for losers. The only real
> editor is a line editor. Worship ed or its bastard cousin edlin.
Whilst this thread seems to have developed a certain tongue-in-cheek
flavour, I'd like to point out that ed does still have its uses.
I still use it quite a bit for editing files on a remote system. I
tend to use XEmacs' shell-mode for most of my shell interaction.
shell-mode provides a line-at-a-time dumb terminal emulator.
Text is sent to the underlying process whenever you press Return, and
output is inserted directly into the buffer. The only processing
performed on the output is CRLF -> LF translation; there isn't any
kind of escape-sequence processing.
On slow telnet connections, this is much more usable than sending a
character at a time. The downside is that you can't run curses
programs such as vi (XEmacs has a curses-friendly terminal emulator,
but it's generally too slow, and you lose the ability to use XEmacs'
editing facilities on your input).
You can edit remote files in XEmacs using FTP, but if you want to make
a small change to a large file, it's much quicker to just use ed.
--
Glynn Clements <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
