Hacker News Reader

Going purely off memory here, but I think the discussion on the mailing list went something like:

Why do we include multiple text editors by default?

Good point let’s just pick one for the base install.

Obvious choice is Vi not Ed because more people are familiar with the former.

Aww. That's not terribly interesting at all. I mean, I get it, and I don't doubt it's validity. It's just so... mundane.

I would have thought there'd be utility in having a very small last-resort utility like ed by default. But then I don't use Vi much (or ed, normally I'm just touching up a file from the command line, so I use nano), so perhaps I'm out of touch.

ed has seen use in scripts -- for example, in Kernighan & Pike's The UNIX Programming Environment. `diff` can output an ed script to perform a patch, and that's what people used before `patch` was invented to make patching more robust. I'm surprised you can't rely on ed being present.

I'm working on a codebase right now which uses ed a lot in scripts. I probably wouldn't write new code which used it --- I like awk --- but it actually does the job pretty well.

Admittedly, the code does date back to 1984 in places.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com