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Comment by smhenderson | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure most of us have seen this but for those who have not - ed is the standard editor!

https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.html

I googled the author, Patrick J. LoPresti, trying to know more about him and what he is up to. I haven't looked deeply, but I found this easter egg on the game Wasteland 2 [1]:

  1992 M.I.T. Class Ring
  Description
  2 city skylines are etched along the edges of this gold ring. 
  The face features a busy beaver. The name "Patrick J. LoPresti" 
  is engraved in script on the interior.

I wonder if it's a tribute because of his joke.

[1]: https://wasteland.gamepedia.com/1992_M.I.T_Class_Ring

In the kickstarter, $2,000 let you design a personalized item. Wasteland was released in 1988 so somebody who graduated in 1992 may have had fond collegiate memories.

The “WYGIWYG” line is absolutely brilliant.

I learned ed, and find it is still useful in many situations. For example, if I want to add a line of text to a file from the command line, I just use ed directly. Another example is trying to change a single line in a file. Even in 2019, ed is still a useful piece of software.

Why ed over ex?

ed is standard. You can use it anywhere there is UNIX.

ex and vi are also in the POSIX standard. As far as popularity I've actually seen plenty of e.g. busybox based systems that leave ed out but keep vi.

Ed is the standard text editor!

Ex doesn't have much in the way of features that demand an upgrade.[1] Vi is too heavyweight; waiting for the screen refresh is tedious.

[1] Although I recall using it. No idea why. (Mmmmm, 1200bps modem from a C-64.)

The thing is, if you use vi/vim in your day to day work, you already know ex. Not only that, but most people who will enhance and debug your script will also already know ex (from using it within vi).

Generous enough to flag errors, yet prudent enough not to overwhelm the novice with verbosity.

That was inspired by Subgenius rants (hence the crossposting to alt.slack).

We were pretty into the Church of the Subgenius around that time.

It never gets old. ;-)

Indeed! The whole GNU humor section of the site is all pretty classic stuff.

funny only if you don't know the context..

e.g. it was 'standard' aka invoked by default as $EDITOR as opposed to say ex or teco, etc.

so calling it 'standard' was a good thing here, since it informed you about how the system worked..

Loving it.

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