[NBLUG/talk] The Debian Way

Ron Wickersham rjw at alembic.com
Fri Oct 28 17:09:01 PDT 2005


On Fri, 28 Oct 2005, Walter Hansen wrote:

> Yes, yes, fighting words, I know. I'll probably even learn emacs when I
> get a chance. In my view a text editor should primarily be easy to use and
> focus on editing text. Simple enough to do most normal things without the
> help of a manual. When vi came along I'm sure it was simple, after all it
> was replacing things like edline (pain in the ass to program with). But
> since that time (1975?) a lot of easier to use text editors have come
> along. But vi remains on every *ix system as a tribute to our geekyness.
> Why not edline? It's even more geeky. I think vi was probably the first
> really usable text editor on *ix systems and everyone collectively heaved
> a sigh of relief and said "I guess that will do" and nobody has had enough
> motivation to replace it with something better.

just a nit, but i never heard of edline, but MicroSoft had a similiarly
named line editor called edlin (which could arguably be said to be more
user-friendly than the minimalistic unix line editor ed.

i'm not sure the predecessor of ed or even if there is one, but you have
to use ed when things get really out of hand and you can't load anything
more advanced.  ed is small, still only 35,912 bytes in Solaris 10 while
gnu ed is 47,252 bytes.   ed assumes you know what you're doing so doesn't
even give you a prompt.   it isn't smaller but restricted ed or red is
restricted to working on files in the current directory.

the Sun man page starts "The ed utility is the standard  text  editor."


enhanced ed is ex, and it still exists inside vi.  in fact when you type
: and a command, you're talking to ex.  ex is bigger,  all of 240,264 bytes
in Solaris 10 and is a hard link to vi, and on a linux box here, gnu ex
is a symbolic link to vi, which is 474,800 bytes.  ex, like ed (and edlin
for that matter) are line editors.  vi is a screen editor, so curses is
used so you can display a window of lines into the edit buffer (the edit
buffer exists in line editors as well) and move the cursor withing the
edit window.


however, every linux box i've seen doesn't run vi when you type the
command vi.  it runs vim which has gotten a lot of doodads that may help
for certain work, but can no longer be logically included in /bin
(in spite of many people running linux like a dos box with one large
partition), and had to be moved to /usr/bin as it's 2,044,536 bytes.
well, to be fair disk space is now plentiful, and single-user workstations
are different animals than time-sharing systems, but i still find it
more comfortable to separate /, /bin, /usr, /usr/local, /home (or
/export/home), var and tmp.   and while the newer bit-map window systems
are interesting to look at, i get more done with CDE.

-ron

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