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From: brantley@coraid.com (Brantley Coile)
Subject: [TUHS] (no subject)
Date: Wed, 20 Jul 2005 17:17:57 -0400	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <1b49272b3bbc9700453cf18bc201181a@coraid.com> (raw)

>>> "vi". Editing with "cat" is possible but not very useful. I am not going
>>> to learn "ed".
>>
>> Why?
> 
> Simply because. Because I do not like ed.
> I want to have useful and user friendly system. To use ed, only because
> it is the oldest editor, does not make any sense for me.
> I appreciate ed, because of sed, because sed has some similarity to ed
> and is extremely useful as a tool.
> Unix is not about ed, Unix is about unlimited possibilities of adding
> new software , new applications or new editors, it makes Unix beautiful
> that it can develop and not editor ed.If ed were all Unix has, it would
> not survive.
> I hope You accept that someone else can have different favourite
> editors. I prefer vi, or even more vim, which is perfect editor.Of
> course in the case of emulator missing user friendly editor is not a
> problem, because I can edit under Coherent and then build under
> emulator.It is good to have a choice, and Unix offers it.

In 1983 I was using vi.  I allowed a friend to use our system to typeset
his companies UNIX manuals, and quickly found that I was having to
share the machine with a dozen troff jobs.  Vi, being a program that
ran in raw mode, didn't respond very well on that 68010 10Mhz system.
I was forced to switch to ed.  Suddenly I discovered that I had hidden
real UNIX behind all those vi commands.  I now had plenty of
mental capacity to use the rest of the tools available.

To really say you understand the spirit of the software tools approach,
you must spend a couple of months just using ed.  Today I use acme
mostly, but still find myself using ed for some edits.

I would really encourage you to give it a try.  Spend two months
just using ed.  You cerntainly should use the editor you feel most
confortable with, but the growing experience will be well worth your while.

  Brantley



             reply	other threads:[~2005-07-20 21:17 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 20+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2005-07-20 21:17 Brantley Coile [this message]
  -- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2022-01-11 23:02 Douglas McIlroy
2021-04-05 22:43 M Douglas McIlroy
2021-04-06  7:23 ` arnold
2021-04-06 23:25 ` Dave Horsfall
2021-04-07  1:01   ` Jon Steinhart
2015-12-26  4:51 Doug McIlroy
2015-12-26  4:49 Doug McIlroy
2015-12-24 18:09 scj
2015-12-24 18:09 scj
2015-07-19 20:55 Brian Walden
2015-07-18 17:43 Mark Longridge
2015-07-18 17:53 ` Larry McVoy
2015-07-19  0:57   ` Warren Toomey
2015-07-19  1:13     ` Larry McVoy
2015-07-19  1:19       ` Milo Velimirovic
2010-01-13  3:42 Larry McVoy
2006-02-22  5:08 dmr
2003-05-23  4:10 Dennis Ritchie
2003-05-24  3:42 ` Kenneth Stailey

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