December 8th -- Ed Mastery

I picked up a book on the `ed` text editor today, the standard UNIX editor. It's a fun little read and it was only a couple of bucks on Amazon. Binary numbering of chapters thrw me initially and I wondered how on earth there could be 100 chapter's worth of stuff to say on the minimal program. It's not that long, nor should it be.

It's the simplicity of the tool that appeals to me. I justify my interest as saying that it'll give me lots of automation capabilities, but then how often am I realistically editing dozens of files in the same way. There's also the argument of its distraction-free nature. You can't see the entire document and in some cases that's a benefit. Took minutes in a meeting today using `ed` and it was really nice to just append points to each section.

I wouldn't go so far as the author of Ed Mastery goes (whether they're entirely sincere is not entirely clear to me), in that I don't think it is essential for anyone who wants to consider themselves a competant engineer but it is neat to pick up something so primitive. It's like learning how to start a fire with sticks and flint. Not entirely practical, but fun.

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Last Updated: 2020-12-08

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