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Comment by legalcorrection | Hacker News Reader

There's no reason to use ed. It's a historical novelty at this point. Move on.

"oh no i reinstalled the os on my vps and now ssh has it on good authority (said authority is line 68) that someone is doing something nasty"

  ed .ssh/config
  68d
  wq

done, didnt fill my terminal with vim or emacs, didnt tab over to my gui editor then back again

also it's a nicely "semantic"/compact/comprehensible way of expressing patches in things like portfiles or nix expressions:

  postPatch = ''
    ed Makefile <<EOF
    /^CFLAGS/s/-DFOO//
    /-funroll-loops/s//-ffast-math/
    /_BSD_SOURCE/s//_DEFAULT_SOURCE/
    /^LDFLAGS/d
    /ranlib/s,,${pkgs.my_special_epic_ranlib}/bin/ranlib,
    wq
    EOF
  '';

etc etc

sure, using ed as your daily driver code editor in 2022 is probably stupid, but it's still useful enough that any linux distro that excludes it by default irritates me

Now that Visual Studio Code has remote edit, you can do all that in a nice, modern way :)

Remote Edit requires installing a node server to connect to. That would crash my router.

> ed .ssh/config

I think this is my ed use-case as well. I've noticed I need to "apt-get install ed" sometimes. The standard editor is not always standard, it seems.

yeah, unfortunately, despite literally being specified in posix (hell, macos bundles it)

one of these days i will go around pestering distro release engineers to include it; after all, it's less heavyweight than any one of their homespun lightdm greeters

The set of utilities specified in POSIX is, erm, not entirely sensible[1]. Though POSIX is more helpful than most large standards I’ve seen, it still ends up mostly having partial implementations (are there any completely 2008-compliant systems, I wonder?).

[1] http://www.landley.net/toybox/roadmap.html#susv4

Why not use sed?

Because it’s not standard.

No, it is. And as other people have pointed out, it ships on more distros.

https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009604499/utilities/se...

It's "ed" which is de facto non-standard.

> The standard editor is not always standard, it seems.

Linux distros don’t follow a standard anymore, as as I can tell. And Linux was never entirely POSIX compliant.

I always used sed for deleting lines from .ssh/config

sed -i 68d .ssh/config

It was an eye-opening experience for me when I realized sed and ed commands are almost identical

It is the Stream EDitor after all.

> oh no i reinstalled the os on my vps and now ssh has it on good authority (said authority is line 68) that someone is doing something nasty

  ssh-keygen -R $HOST

IIRC the security warning actually used to suggest this command, but then stopped in order to discourage people from thoughtlessly bypassing it. (I don’t like this pracrice of deliberate unhelpfulness—cf Chrome’s “thisisunsafe” HSTS override—but neither do I like the results of being helpful in such cases. Ugh.)

> also it's a nicely "semantic"/compact/comprehensible way of expressing patches in things like portfiles or nix expressions

As far as I can tell, your ed script sans the wq at the end is a valid sed(1) script, and that is what people usually use for casual patching in packaging situations (although Nix also has substituteInPlace et al).

IIRC, it is mandated by POSIX/SUS, so even if it ends up not being used ever, to deliberately not include it is ... doesn't feel right.

LPMUD's online editor comes with a reasonable implementation of ed. It's actually the only way to edit files in the MUD environment (and as a result, how I learned ed).

Wasnt there a way to change your editor in discworld? Maybe they use very customized lpmud

Discworld is a very customized lpmud, though there are other muds also based on Discworld's core code ("driver"). The default editor on Discworld wasn't ed, but a simpler, less-powerful line editor. ed was available as an option, though, last I checked (last time I logged in was when Pterry died, and then I hadn't logged in for years).

Ditto, learned ed and C that way. Tried again recently but quickly switched to editing files remotely.

ed is surprisingly usable (and useful, and fun to use), you should try it.

> no reason

This is like saying "There is no reason to use UNIX (now that we have Ubuntu, Gnome, and Wayland)." Personally, I tend to stick with the CLI for as long as it gets me where I need.

It's a handy tool for scripting certain kinds of file editing operations. It's also good for editing files over remote management connections that don't implement a proper terminal interface. As with a lot of the Unix CLI, it may not be something you use frequently (or ever), but it's a godsend when you need it.

patch can export to ed-scripts. So that you can bundle creation and editing into your builds, and installers and all sorts, because you can depend on ed existing.

I still use /bin/ed over vi. Seriously.

(And then install Emacs and turn off the screen candy fluff they've added over the last 25-30 years).

What about sed? That thing is still useful and far more commonly used than ed.

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