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Comment by Koshkin | Hacker News Reader

I try ed(1) once in a while and I find it pretty usable (and even rather efficient if you know what you are doing). cat(1) also works if you just want to type a new text.

Speaking of terseness, I love the the fact that C does not have 'fn'.

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We used to speak of a great Unix systems programmer as someone who could write device drivers with cat and have them compile and run the first time.

Before I look up `man cat`, what can you do with `cat` other than just see what's in a file?

When not given a file, cat will just read from stdin, so you can use "cat > file.c", write some text, and send EOF with ^D when you're done.

Obviously, there's no way to go back and edit anything mid-stream, you have to write the whole thing out in one shot.

The backspace does work within the line.

If your terminal is in line-buffered mode.

You can join files together.

    $ cat foo bar > baz

will join the files foo and bar together into a single file called baz

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