On Sat, Jul 4, 2020 at 12:33 PM Adam Thornton <athornton@gmail.com> wrote:

The "s" editor is written by Webb Miller and appears in his book "A
> Software Tools Sampler."
>

Wow, I never knew about this book, though I know ST and STP well, and used
ST on RSX-11/M+ and VAX/VMS for $EMPLOYER in the 1980s.  Is the rest of the
source code for the book available online anywhere?

Jez Higgins is rewriting the STP tools into modern C++.  His blog posts are
at <https://www.jezuk.co.uk/tags/software-tools-in-c++.html> and the code
is at <https://github.com/jezhiggins/stiX>.  He's rewritten the tools in
chapters 1 and 2 and part of 3.

Since I find ed thoroughly unpleasant to use, having a screen editor was a
> must for me to use v7 for any length of time, and s fills that role rather
> nicely.
>

Gotcha.  I actually like line editors (you can't mung your file so
thoroughly with a single stray keystroke), but I'm willing to trade a
little standardosity for additional convenience, so I do almost all my
editing of prose and programs in `ex`, occasionally dropping into vi-mode
for matching open and close markers in Lisp and XML.



John Cowan          http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan        cowan@ccil.org
If you have ever wondered if you are in hell, it has been said, then
you are on a well-traveled road of spiritual inquiry.  If you are
absolutely sure you are in hell, however, then you must be on the Cross
Bronx Expressway.  --Alan Feuer, New York Times, 2002-09-20