Hacker News Reader

Comment by chrisoverzero | Hacker News Reader

Here’s the claim:

> [ed] does not have the immediate visual feedback when entering text that even mechanical typewriters have.

…and here’s the counterclaim:

    .s/does not have/does have/g
    p

See how you had to type another command to see the results of this substitution? I don’t think this demonstrates what you want it to.

View on HN

Typewriters don't have substitution. The immediate visual feedback when entering text in ed is that the keystrokes are echoed to the screen. This occurs regardless of whether you're writing commands or you're in insert mode, such as in this case:

    i
    Ed is indeed a good choice for a line editor. We're not talking about line editors, though, but about text editors. Ed is not useful for writing, because it does not have the immediate visual feedback when entering text that even mechanical typewriters have. For that, you need a text editor, and between Vim and Nano, only one behaves like most Unix software developed in the past three decades.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com