Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by Joker_vD | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

Joker_vD

Ugh, all this crazy head-spinning cursor commotion... I'll just keep using ed, thank you very much.

View on HN

Always keep your copy of Ed Mastery on-hand:

https://mwl.io/nonfiction/tools#ed

If you think about it, it's a cheap book on sed too.

Just start ex instead. Command-based line editing without the hassle of a cursor.

Yeah, it's just better to stick to the standard editor.

COPY CON ...

on DOS, bro.

nuttin else comes close

or if ur 2 weak, edlin.

I actually use "COPY CON" a fair amount. Also a decent amount of "cat > foo.sh".

Ha ha.

Same here.

Also, in shell,

  >file

can be used to delete a file, IIRC. Not at a Unix box right now, so can't check.

And:

  echo *

is the poor man's ls command, as in, "poor man, his Unix OS is corrupted , and many commands are missing".

And similarly dd is that man's cat command. :)

yes, it makes sense in some situations, because if all you want to do create a small batch (.BAT) file of a few lines, and you are a careful / good typist, the COPY CON method can be a lot faster then firing up your favourite editor, even a fast one like vim, to create the file, save it and exit.

and the same applies for UNIX.

I did my high school typewriting test in PC skills using edlin, and never ever used it again.

For coding in MS-DOS, I was using Borland IDEs, and there was the nice Q programmers editor as well.

I used many text editors over the years.

At one time, I used PFE, the Programmer's File Editor, which was lightweight and fast, on Windows.

It had a feature of being able to open large files.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmer's_File_Editor

https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/people/steveb/cpaap/pfe/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com