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Comment by MarkusWandel | Hacker News Reader

Arguably, interactive editing with "ed" is an obsolete skill that went out with 110baud mechanical teletypes.

However, having a basic idea of "sed" is a goldmine for super-quick command line pipeline kinds of tricks. Even in this day and age.

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It remained a valuable skill into the 1990s when many UNIX machines still had a separate /usr partition.

Many times I'd have to fix a server with a configuration issue causing /usr to not mount correctly on boot. When you're at a single-user shell and no /usr/bin/vi is available suddenly knowing the basics of /bin/ed becomes very useful.

Of course these days most UNIXes moved away from a separate /usr partition so if the root filesystem mounts you have a full-featured vim.

ed also was, at least on LPMuds in the 90s, the only online editor. It was a bit crippled, but still recognizably ed.

PSA if you use sed with anything but trivial patterns, consider supplying the pattern via file `sed -f script.sed`. Saves you a lot of sanity not having to escape everything in arcane shell + regex escape rules.

I used ed on video terminals connected to VME 68000 Unix V7 machines around 1986. For some reason, I don't remember using vi on them, and in any case, ed remained very useful when the terminal type was misconfigured or unknown to the system, which happened quite a lot (I guess that not everything emulated a VT100 at the time). We actually jumped directly from ed to some Emacs relative (Jove probably), which was the beginning of paradise, and then we received our Sun 3 and it was Emacs all the way to present :)

vi is painful over slow lines, maybe that was it? When I started at SCO in '86 my terminal connected at 9600 baud to a VME 68000 box named "scotty" running Xenix. (All our servers had names containing "sco". Over the years I think we had to settle for just having the letters somewhere in the name.) 9600 baud was luxury after university, where all our terminals connected at 2400 baud.

ed is still great if I just want to fix a few lines remotely over a terminal. You might say ed is interactive sed :)

sed and vi both have roots in ed, right? So you only needed one more round of advancement from ed to reach peak computing.

I mean we’re all joking in this thread to some extent, but actually, I don’t know that I don’t believe this.

> sed and vi both have roots in ed

A joke I used to tell people is "don't know how to quit vi? Just type Q to enter Ex mode, then you can exit vi just like how you would exit ed."

Clearly the solution is :!killall vi or something along those lines.

Ironically I’m studying all the oldest of oldest UNIX utilities that can work well over a pure teletype style terminal, think a LA34 DECwriter IV. No ncurses, no TUI. only line feeds and also ink is scarce.

Why? Because we have a new friend in the house who effectively has to interact with the outside world via teletype terminal.

The LLMs!

A great point, but even over a teletype you'd use "ex", not "ed".

Totally true! Thank you for reminding me of ex.

Curious: Why would you use ed over ex, or vi for that matter?

"ed" is easier to type than "ex" but mostly it's a matter of habit. On some systems, /bin/ed is a separate binary but /usr/bin/ex is actually just a symlink to vim, and at that point I might as well run vim.

As to why I run "ed" instead of "vi": if I get just a few errors from some script I just copied over, I could run "ed" and the error message is still on the screen (because ed doesn't repaint the whole screen). I would run vi and screen if I expect to fix more than just a few lines.

makes sense

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