On Thu, Nov 5, 2015 at 6:38 AM, Christian Gollwitzer <aurio...@gmx.de> wrote: > Am 04.11.15 um 19:24 schrieb Ben Finney: >> >> The name is a mnemonic for a compound command in ‘ed’ [0], a text editor >> that pre-dates extravagant luxuries like “presenting a full screen of >> text at one time”. >> >> [... lots of fun facts ...] > > > Here is another fun fact: The convincing UI of ed was actually so widely > applied, that even Microsoft included a similar editor into MSDOS, called > EDLIN. EDLIN, of course, was a bastardized version of ed that could do much > less and also lacked regular expressions. Needless to say that the mighty > "VIsual" editor was out 5 years before MSDOS shipped EDLIN as the only > editor... > > In contrast to ed, the stream editor "sed" is used multiple times avery day > in a typical Unix session inside shell scripts to perform automated text > processing tasks, including regex replacement.
As someone who grew up on MS-DOS, I'd like to mention that EDLIN's value wasn't in the obvious places. There were two features it had that most other editors didn't: firstly, it would read only as much of the file as it needed, so you could edit a file larger than available memory; and secondly, all commands came from stdin, which could be redirected - making it a poor man's 'sed'. Using EDLIN for regular file editing was never the normal thing. Fast forward a decade or two, and I'm working on a MUD server for a friend. It incorporates an editor that can be used on a dumb telnet connection - and it's line based again. So there's clearly some value here :) Visual editors get the lion's share of actual editing work, but in special circumstances, it is nice to have a quick little ed-like program around. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
