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Comment by YeGoblynQueenne | Hacker News Reader

You think being stuck inside vim is bad? Wait 'till you're stuck inside ed, in the Unix mode of Z/OS on a mainframe.

... that you can't even reboot.

  ?
  exit
  ?
  quit
  ? 
  bye
  ?
  ^[
  ? 
  HELP!
  ?

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"Note the consistent user interface and error reportage. Ed is generous enough to flag errors, yet prudent enough not to overwhelm the novice with verbosity." - Ed, man! !man ed [0]

[0] https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.en.html

> Of course, on the system I administrate, vi is symlinked to ed. Emacs has been replaced by a shell script which 1) Generates a syslog message at level LOG_EMERG; 2) reduces the user's disk quota by 100K; and 3) RUNS ED!!!!!!

Just in case you're on a system without ed, I've written this one liner to simulate its functionality:

    trap 'echo -e "\n?"' INT; while true; do read; echo "?"; done

ed is in POSIX, so a system without it is seriously broken.

Though ^D does work if you haven't made any changes to the file ;)

But, for those who don't know it already, the way to exit ed is either

wq

to save the file and exit, or

to exit without saving.

so basically vim, except a capital instead of exclamation mark

ed basically works like what you can do in vim's normal mode (other than not having to prefix the commands with a :). IIRC, Bill Joy wrote ex as an improved version of ed and he subsequently added a visual mode to ex called vi. You can enter ex mode in vim using Q (though it may be bound to gQ) and you can exit it by typing vi.

This suddenly reminded me that as a kid I somehow learned how to use EDLIN in MSDOS. Once I got 5.0 with the full-screen EDIT, all knowledge of how to use EDLIN immediately left.

I think quitting EDLIN was Q.

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