Re: [TUHS] manual humour (was tunefs -m 5%)

[Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com>]

ed was my goto over any modem, it's very undemanding in terms of characters
transferred.  Can't tell you how many times I've done

ed foo.c
/^some_function
20p
goto the line
c
whatever
.
w
q

So a lot of use so long as I was using dial up, some continued use when I was
doing bring up and the tty driver was all screwed up so you are typing at
some slow console.

Once performance wasn't an issue, it was vi all the time.  I did a year in
emacs, never warmed up to it, I know some people love it, I MUCH preferred
the way vi works.  So back to vi, some time spent in xvi because I was on
4MB main memory Sun machines so I made a version of libc that treated \n
like normal libc treats \0, then changed xvi so it used mmap(2) to map
the file instead of reading it in and strdup()ing every line.  I did that
because I was looking at performance logs and the very most I could fit 
into memory was 1/2 of what I could fit into memory with mmap().  That
2x bigger was a big deal to me, I was in out of those logs all the time.

xvi also had buffers, like emacs, you could be looking at 2 files at once
or 2 different regions of the same file.

Then vim came along and it had everything I wanted and I didn't have to
support it so I have been in vim since 1996 (that's the last time the
xvi source that I have was touched).

If things get wonky, ed still works, which is pleasant.  But 99.9% of the
time I'm in vim, I'm in it right now, typing this.  I still use mutt(1)
as my mail reader and I wacked it to drop me into vim.

On Wed, Mar 10, 2021 at 09:30:46AM +1100, Rob Pike wrote:
> I'm curious when people (other than me) erred and stopped saying that ed
> was the standard editor.
> 
> -rob

-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm