[ThePythonicCow]

better than ... ed. Vi at least.

vi sucks, in my view. I much prefer ed. The vi command was derived from Version 6 ed, whereas some nice little improvements that were made in Version 7 ed never made it to vi.

Back then, we ran a group of 10 or 20 people, as simultaneous interactive users, on a 256 Mb DEC PDP 11/45, running Version 6 or 7 full blown Unix.

[ThePythonicCow]

Oops -- 256 Mb Kb DEC PDP 11/45

[dayglored]

> vi sucks, in my view. I much prefer ed. The vi command was derived from Version 6 ed, whereas some nice little improvements that were made in Version 7 ed never made it to vi.

Oh, we agree that vi sucks. I prefer modeless screen editing.

But I'm confused. The ed I know (/bin/ed) is strictly a line editor -- you even have to request a prompt 'P'. I use it when I have to edit /etc/fstab from a single-user shell when a crashed system refuses to boot with fsck hung on a failed drive. But it's only marginally better than writing with a sharp pointy stick and a pile of poo, for anything more complicated than a 10-line config file.

Are we talking about the same ed?