Chris's Wiki :: blog/unix/EdBelieveGoodEditor Commentshttps://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/EdBelieveGoodEditor?atomcommentsDWiki2018-10-25T19:58:51ZRecent comments in Chris's Wiki :: blog/unix/EdBelieveGoodEditor.By Greg A. Woods on /blog/unix/EdBelieveGoodEditortag:CSpace:blog/unix/EdBelieveGoodEditor:5fb3339eaa9d39f64d49037deaaca567cb0b398fGreg A. Woods<div class="wikitext"><p>Thanks Edward! I knew there was something somewhere written about the state of editing and the motivations for <code>ed</code> (outside the Unix documentation itself that is). I had completely forgotten that a variant of <code>ed</code> that had been presented in <em>Software Tools</em>.</p>
<p>The quoted text you show is verbatim in the 1976 edition as well.</p>
</div>2018-10-25T19:58:51ZBy Edward Berner on /blog/unix/EdBelieveGoodEditortag:CSpace:blog/unix/EdBelieveGoodEditor:c1ed6a594bbe74e9c202120b0b297a8d692bd3f2Edward Berner<div class="wikitext"><p>Kernighan and Plauger's Software Tools in Pascal (1981) has some interesting context at the beginning of chapter 6 on Editing:</p>
<blockquote><p>All interactive computing systems (and some batch systems) have some form of editing facility, but it is often rudimentary. The ability to do context searches with regular expressions, make global changes, or do arbitrary file I/O is often left out of even "advanced" editors. Those that include these features often have a command syntax so cumbersome that it is largely unused.</p>
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<blockquote><p>The editor we present here is modeled after the latest in a long family of conversational text editors that have achieved wide acceptance. Concern for human engineering dominates the design -- edit tries to be concise, regular, and powerful. Because edit is primarily intended for interactive use, it is streamlined and terse, but easy to use. This is especially important for a text editor: for most users it is the primary interface to the system. (On our Unix system, the editor accounts for fifteen percent of all commands executed, more than three times the nearest competitor.)</p>
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<p>They also mention that it is not a full screen editor, and basically say that a full screen editor would be larger and less portable than what they want to tackle within the scope of the book.</p>
</div>2018-10-24T05:41:23ZBy Leah Neukirchen on /blog/unix/EdBelieveGoodEditortag:CSpace:blog/unix/EdBelieveGoodEditor:5630bd0e9d5eafa062906a83fac50802310db389Leah Neukirchenhttp://chneukirchen.org/<div class="wikitext"><p>I think ed fossilized too quickly, before many other Unix features actually appeared. E.g. why can't ed pipe a region through a filter? (Likely because ed was there before pipes.)</p>
<p>Likewise, editing multiple files is tedious without job control (which probably only appeared after the machines had enough memory to support multiple files easily).</p>
</div>2018-10-19T11:37:41Z