Ed is the standard text editor (1991)

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5 points·jnordwick··3 comments

For as long as I can remember, on mobile Safari, links to Google Groups pages redirect to Google Groups' main page. "request desktop site" doesn't work. So frustrating. Can't read this article--my apologies that I'm meta-commenting instead of commenting.

Even on desktop browser, Google Groups aggravates me. (I'm struggling now not to curse). At least 1/3 of my screen real estate is taken by empty space, top bars and side bars. Disabling JavaScript breaks the site. Why should it? Am I not merely viewing text, something we've done well since fucking Usenet?? Oops I swore. Does the back button work nowadays?

I hate Google Groups. Are there alternate viewers?

Given that my failed attempt to front page this oldie but goodie Internet joke, meta comments seem fine :)

First, here is a link to this old post. http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.txt

The USENET post (the Google link) just has all the response which are pretty cool historically.

Also Google seems to be going in that very low information density direction. The new Inbox Gmail interface is terrible about that. The other day I was tempted to take a screenshot and send it to Google. It only showed me 4 mail message headers on my laptop because each subject was so big, space around them so empty, and all needed to show thumbnail of signature attachments (not even real attachments, just signatures). It's completely unusable like that.

I recently started the effort to learning Ed. I kind of like it but I found myself wishing that it had been compiled against Readline (I like Bash's command line editing and the ability to CRTL-L to clear the screen).

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