Meditation on ed

It felt more appropriate to meditate on ed, the standard text editor, in a tty rather than in a GUI terminal. 90s memes aside, here's what I learned about ed.

You can set a prompt using the P command or the -p option so you can more easily tell if you're in command or input mode.

You can use the H command to make ed show more helpful error messages than just "?".

Due to the relatively higher mental overhead of copying lines I'm more likely to just re-type things. Whether this results in fewer copy-paste errors or more typos has yet to be seen.

I tend to think more before starting typing with ed than with a visual text editor.

I initially thought I would have to type this entry pretty much in one go but turns out editing previous lines is not nearly as difficult as I originally expected.

Ed is a great example of design under constraints. The orthogonal commands combined with line-based and regex-based addressing make it a powerful tiny text editor. It contains all the basic functionality you'd expect from a text editor and nothing more.

Editing text in ed is much more workable than I thought it would be. Of course a visual text editor would be much faster but using ed was surprisingly pleasant.

This has been a fun exercise and I'll likely use ed some more in the future, maybe on my Raspberry Pi 1B+ where vim is too slow to start. I recommend giving the ed manpage a quick read, if only to see an elegant and minimal text editor design.

This entry was written using ed.

Sotiris 2023-05-14