Actually using Ed (2012)

I'm showing my age but one of my early compsci courses the only editor available on the lab systems (at least the only editor we had access to) was ed.

After 4 months, I went on a co-op term and vi was VERY nice to use if you had 4 months of intense training in regular expressions and substitution patterns using ed.

I wanted to use ed for something recently and was punched with:

  bash: ed: command not found

Apparently, despite being mandated by POSIX, not every Linux distro (e.g. Arch) ship it by default

This only focuses on using ed interactively. IMHO, ed's greatest utility is in scripts. For example, I still use "diff -e" as I find for small patches, it is more concise and no less readable. YMMV. I also like ed for non-interactively editing large files.

sed is most preferred, but IME there are some simple tasks that are not possible (or exceedingly difficult) with sed but possible with ed.

For example, moving lines and joining lines are obvious ones. Another is using line address "0", namely, with the "r" command.

Both sed and ed allow reading in a file after line 1 but AFAIK only ed allows inserting before line 1, at "line 0". According to the ed changelog, in 2006, the source was changed so that the "i" and "c" commands treat address 0 as address 1.

For example, a common task for me is to insert the contents of file #1 at the top of file #2.

AFAIK, this is impossible using sed's "r" command, but it's possible using ed's "r" command.

   test $# -eq 2||exec echo usage: $0 srcfile dstfile
   printf '0r '$1'\nw\nq\n'|ed -s $2 

A less space-efficient solution, without resorting to fifos, might be something like

   cat $2 $1 > $1.$$.tmp;
   exec mv $1.$$.tmp $1;

If you think ed is confusing or complicated, remember that Ken used ed to build Unix.

ed is not bad at all.

ed is a line editor, which makes it manageable.

This distinguishes it from TECO, which is a character editor.

I find command line character editors hard to use. It's very easy to lose your place, and the cognitive load is just too high for me.

Now, mind, I never used one in anger for any real length of time. But the learning curve was off putting enough to make me seek greener pastures instead.

Like ed.

I used ed for a bit. I was using it to type in the ed clone from the Software Tools book, trying to get it to work in Turbo Pascal on CP/M (with the hope that I could get and ed to work on CP/M, because CP/Ms ed is awful).

It was quite useable and manageable. I had some rough parts, which I can't recall, but it wasn't a horrific experience to be sure.

I've been using it for small edits over the past few months, it's not that bad.

It would take very little to make it very good:

- a quick shortcut to open the file at current line in a pager

- perhaps redesign it to work without having to hit enter after you give a command

Still use ed commands but mostly in vi command line mode.

For me the most useful feature is the ability it has to remember the contents of regular expression matches inside \( ... \) and when you combine this with the g global edit command you can do complex manipulations in a similar way on every line in a file with a single ed line.

So

g/\(regex1\)whatever\(regex2\)/s//\2something\1/

switches whatever text matches regex1 and whatever matches regex2 and changes the intermediate text also. It's a lot to type but quite easy once you have done it a few times to write a single edit that transforms your file exactly the way you want in one go or nearly so.

However dealing with columnar data it's probably better to use something like awk.

Related:

Actually Using Ed (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30318638 - Feb 2022 (7 comments)

Actually using ed (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13113556 - Dec 2016 (88 comments)

Actually using Ed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4120513 - June 2012 (89 comments)

Off-topic: I am pretty sure this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34159914 or this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34160129 is responsible for this submission, in which case it's not off-topic ^^.

Last time I used ed was to change the network config of a Linux instance in an S/390 LPAR, mostly because I was the only one with any experience with it (an ed clone from back in my CP/M days). Not that I didn't have to scour 1999's Internet for a decent cheat sheet. The mainframe guys were impressed, but I only started breathing when the LPAR came back up and we were able to get a telnet connection.

ed's terseness was advantageous and doubly so when working with a thermal printer terminal over an acoustic modem. Source: personal experience.

> 11 Jul 91 - When I log into my Xenix system with my 110 baud teletype, both vi and Emacs are just too damn slow. They print useless messages like, ‘C-h for help’ and ‘“foo” File is read only’. So I use the editor that doesn't waste my VALUABLE time.

This is actually true if you ask ChatGPT to simulate a Unix session, and try editing text files. You literally can't use a visual editor.

cheatsheet for the lazies https://catonmat.net/ed-unix-text-editor-cheat-sheet

Back in the day, the only in-game editor for MudOS was an ed like editor. I spent many hours on that. It was a factor in deciding to learn vim over emacs at the time.

we once had a little Ed script called "Offending" which would accept the ssh connection failure line

  Offending key ...

and edit the failing key out of the known_hosts file.

extremely useful with bazillions of fresh virtual guests with well known static IP. you simply cut and paste the "Offending key" line into the shell and the ed script does it's magic.

(2012)

I thought this was going to be about Ed25519. And I was about to pull out my pitchforks if it ended up talking negative about my boy.