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Comment by SoftTalker | Hacker News Reader

I had to use ed once in a very limited recovery situation. I don't remember the details but even vi was not an option. It's not terrible if you just need to change a few lines. Using it on a teletype to write code all day would get tedious quickly. Full-screen editors had to have been an amazing productivity boost.

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The amount of code was relatively low.

Not the million line codebases we have today. 50-100 lines was the usual program or script.

iirc they were initially using actual ttys(as in typewriters) and the input delay was hell which is the reason so many UNIX commands are two letters.

So likely they would work on the printout:

   1,$n

And then input the corrections into ed(1).

That was one generation before this. In unix v4 times, input latency was in the order of ~100ms, basically limited by the serial port.

Pretty advanced terminals were starting to show up too - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VT100

ed makes a lot more sense if you remember they were printing everything to paper rather than using a glass tty when it was first developed

I think ed is still a great editor for specific tasks. As a plan 9/9front user, when you get yourself into trouble, it's sometimes the only editor you've got left (like when graphics doesn't initialize, which I've not seen on 9front — ever?)

It's really not bad, and you can use it for scripting like sed, but it's clunkier.

I had to use it when I installed 9front on a computer that has no graphics card just a serial port (APU2C2). I had only a serial device at 9600bps and the other text editors (sam, acme) didn't worked. I wanted to turn it into a CPU server so I can use drawterm to access it remotely and that requires editing a few files.

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