From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: brantley@coraid.com (Brantley Coile)
Date: Wed, 20 Jul 2005 17:17:57 -0400
Subject: [TUHS] (no subject)
Message-ID: <1b49272b3bbc9700453cf18bc201181a@coraid.com>

>>> "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