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

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

[Norman Wilson]

In the Seventh Edition manual, a joke was added to
the entry for kill(1).  It appears in every following
Research manual, but seems to have been discarded
by all modern descendants.

I guess the prejudice against humour in the manual
is extreme these days.

Norman Wilson
Toronto ON

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

[Henry Bent]

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-.TH KILL 1
-.SH NAME
-kill \- terminate a process with extreme prejudice

One of my favorite references.

At least the offensive fortunes still survive in some form?

-Henry

On Tue, 9 Mar 2021 at 11:24, Norman Wilson <norman@oclsc.org> wrote:

> In the Seventh Edition manual, a joke was added to
> the entry for kill(1).  It appears in every following
> Research manual, but seems to have been discarded
> by all modern descendants.
>
> I guess the prejudice against humour in the manual
> is extreme these days.
>
> Norman Wilson
> Toronto ON
>

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

[Steffen Nurpmeso]

Henry Bent wrote in
 <CAEdTPBcGT_8fdrD10Gp_D3DZAWTEMyayGPEW0oEfWmwHoarsxw@mail.gmail.com>:
 |-.TH KILL 1
 |-.SH NAME
 |-kill \- terminate a process with extreme prejudice
 |
 |One of my favorite references.
 |
 |At least the offensive fortunes still survive in some form?

People do not have time to read such offensive terms, they bath in
blood while playing Counter Strike (or another first person
shooter), having their double quarter pounder at hand.

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)

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

[Henry Bent]

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On Tue, 9 Mar 2021 at 15:22, Steffen Nurpmeso <steffen@sdaoden.eu> wrote:

> Henry Bent wrote in
>  <CAEdTPBcGT_8fdrD10Gp_D3DZAWTEMyayGPEW0oEfWmwHoarsxw@mail.gmail.com>:
>  |-.TH KILL 1
>  |-.SH NAME
>  |-kill \- terminate a process with extreme prejudice
>  |
>  |One of my favorite references.
>  |
>  |At least the offensive fortunes still survive in some form?
>
> People do not have time to read such offensive terms, they bath in
> blood while playing Counter Strike (or another first person
> shooter), having their double quarter pounder at hand.
>

Indeed.  I think many people have been teenagers and been that person in
some form or another, but outgrowing a phase of life doesn't mean
forgetting or ignoring it.

A quick grep through the CSRG CDs revealed that the phrase survived in 32v,
as well as in some form of BSDs up to 4.3-Tahoe.  mh also had a variant of
it (wow, the irony...).

-Henry

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

[Rob Pike]

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I'm curious when people (other than me) erred and stopped saying that ed
was the standard editor.

-rob

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

[Larry McVoy]

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 

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

[Steve Nickolas]

On Wed, 10 Mar 2021, Rob Pike wrote:

> I'm curious when people (other than me) erred and stopped saying that ed
> was the standard editor.
>
> -rob
>

I actually use that expression in somewhat unorthodox ways. ;)

Like "CDE is the standard desktop environment like ed is the standard text 
editor." (I still consider both to be true even though about no one uses 
either anymore.)

-uso.

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

[Rob Pike]

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The phrase disappeared from the manuals at some point. I might have
committed the offense myself: The Research Unix manuals all continue the
phrase, but the Plan 9 ones say:

ED(1)                                                       ED(1)


     NAME

          ed - text editor


     SYNOPSIS

          ed [ - ] [ -o ] [ file ]


     DESCRIPTION

          Ed is a venerable text editor.


I likely made the "venerable" substitution. I regret that now.


Ed is the standard editor.


-rob



On Wed, Mar 10, 2021 at 10:53 AM Steve Nickolas <usotsuki@buric.co> wrote:

> On Wed, 10 Mar 2021, Rob Pike wrote:
>
> > I'm curious when people (other than me) erred and stopped saying that ed
> > was the standard editor.
> >
> > -rob
> >
>
> I actually use that expression in somewhat unorthodox ways. ;)
>
> Like "CDE is the standard desktop environment like ed is the standard text
> editor." (I still consider both to be true even though about no one uses
> either anymore.)
>
> -uso.
>

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

[Anthony Martin]

Rob Pike <robpike@gmail.com> once said:
> I likely made the "venerable" substitution. I regret that now.

9front is carrying the torch.

changeset:   4289:e62c2add78cd
parent:      4287:cc0dd57e33f1
user:        khm
date:        Fri Feb 20 15:09:25 2015 -0500
files:       sys/man/1/ed
description:
restore balance to reality


diff --git a/sys/man/1/ed b/sys/man/1/ed
--- a/sys/man/1/ed
+++ b/sys/man/1/ed
@@ -14,7 +14,7 @@
 ]
 .SH DESCRIPTION
 .I Ed
-is a venerable text editor.
+is the standard text editor.
 .PP
 If a
 .I file

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

[Nemo Nusquam]

On 2021-03-09 17:30, Rob Pike wrote:
> I'm curious when people (other than me) erred and stopped saying that 
> ed was the standard editor.
>
> -rob
>
Ed, man! !man, ed.

(
Sorry -- I could not resist.

N.
)

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

[Andreas Kusalananda Kähäri]

On Tue, Mar 09, 2021 at 06:51:56PM -0500, Steve Nickolas wrote:
> On Wed, 10 Mar 2021, Rob Pike wrote:
> 
> > I'm curious when people (other than me) erred and stopped saying that ed
> > was the standard editor.
> > 
> > -rob
> > 
> 
> I actually use that expression in somewhat unorthodox ways. ;)
> 
> Like "CDE is the standard desktop environment like ed is the standard text
> editor." (I still consider both to be true even though about no one uses
> either anymore.)
> 
> -uso.

Hi, I'm "about no one".  I use ed(1) every once in a while, both the
way it was supposed to be used, i.e. interactively, and occasionally
scripted on smaller documents.

I'm soon 50.  Having grown up with computers, and having spent most of
my money as a student buying the next bigger and/or faster PC, I find
that I nowadays enjoy smaller, slower systems and simpler editors more
and more.  Getting distracted by syntax highligting, confused by too
complicated configurations... There is a certain beauty in the editing
language of ed(1).  It's minimalistic and restrictive, and therefore
forces you to think, to remember, and to be creative.

One of my big sorrows is not *having* to deal with ed(1) as a youngster
or student, over slow modem links.  I think I would appreciate Unix even
more now if I had.  I was born one or two decades too late.

ed(1) is still the standard editor though, and so is ex(1) and vi(1), at
least if POSIX is to be believed :-)


-- 
Andreas (Kusalananda) Kähäri
SciLifeLab, NBIS, ICM
Uppsala University, Sweden

.

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

[Andy Kosela]

On 3/10/21, Andreas Kusalananda Kähäri <andreas.kahari@abc.se> wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 09, 2021 at 06:51:56PM -0500, Steve Nickolas wrote:
>> On Wed, 10 Mar 2021, Rob Pike wrote:
>>
>> > I'm curious when people (other than me) erred and stopped saying that
>> > ed
>> > was the standard editor.
>> >
>> > -rob
>> >
>>
>> I actually use that expression in somewhat unorthodox ways. ;)
>>
>> Like "CDE is the standard desktop environment like ed is the standard
>> text
>> editor." (I still consider both to be true even though about no one uses
>> either anymore.)
>>
>> -uso.
>
> Hi, I'm "about no one".  I use ed(1) every once in a while, both the
> way it was supposed to be used, i.e. interactively, and occasionally
> scripted on smaller documents.
>
> I'm soon 50.  Having grown up with computers, and having spent most of
> my money as a student buying the next bigger and/or faster PC, I find
> that I nowadays enjoy smaller, slower systems and simpler editors more
> and more.  Getting distracted by syntax highligting, confused by too
> complicated configurations... There is a certain beauty in the editing
> language of ed(1).  It's minimalistic and restrictive, and therefore
> forces you to think, to remember, and to be creative.

This comment resonates with me so much.  I am enjoying these days
mostly retro systems too -- computers I grew up with.  There is a
certain beauty in the term "less is more".  And nothing is more
satisfying than sitting in front of a CRT terminal (either some real
terminal or PC) and working in a full screen text mode.  No GUIs, no
distractions -- just pure conversation with a machine using only text.
That's UNIX for me.

These days there have been a huge resurgence of various retro
communities around the world.  There are still tons of new programs
and games being published for 8-bit micro's or Amiga's.  Still it
appears the Unix community in general is not part of that movement.  I
think TUHS is an exception and a haven for people who just prefer the
old ways.  I find Unix these days too bloated and moved away from its
main core values: simplicity and minimalism.  The hardware was much
simpler too back in the days.

Long live the ed(1) and vi(1).

--Andy

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

[Ken Thompson]

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back to original title - manual humour.
my favorite was in the "form" command.
-- credit to mcilroy.

"If one of the special characters [{]}\ is preceded
by a \, it loses its special character."


On Wed, Mar 10, 2021 at 11:50 AM Andy Kosela <akosela@andykosela.com> wrote:

> On 3/10/21, Andreas Kusalananda Kähäri <andreas.kahari@abc.se> wrote:
> > On Tue, Mar 09, 2021 at 06:51:56PM -0500, Steve Nickolas wrote:
> >> On Wed, 10 Mar 2021, Rob Pike wrote:
> >>
> >> > I'm curious when people (other than me) erred and stopped saying that
> >> > ed
> >> > was the standard editor.
> >> >
> >> > -rob
> >> >
> >>
> >> I actually use that expression in somewhat unorthodox ways. ;)
> >>
> >> Like "CDE is the standard desktop environment like ed is the standard
> >> text
> >> editor." (I still consider both to be true even though about no one uses
> >> either anymore.)
> >>
> >> -uso.
> >
> > Hi, I'm "about no one".  I use ed(1) every once in a while, both the
> > way it was supposed to be used, i.e. interactively, and occasionally
> > scripted on smaller documents.
> >
> > I'm soon 50.  Having grown up with computers, and having spent most of
> > my money as a student buying the next bigger and/or faster PC, I find
> > that I nowadays enjoy smaller, slower systems and simpler editors more
> > and more.  Getting distracted by syntax highligting, confused by too
> > complicated configurations... There is a certain beauty in the editing
> > language of ed(1).  It's minimalistic and restrictive, and therefore
> > forces you to think, to remember, and to be creative.
>
> This comment resonates with me so much.  I am enjoying these days
> mostly retro systems too -- computers I grew up with.  There is a
> certain beauty in the term "less is more".  And nothing is more
> satisfying than sitting in front of a CRT terminal (either some real
> terminal or PC) and working in a full screen text mode.  No GUIs, no
> distractions -- just pure conversation with a machine using only text.
> That's UNIX for me.
>
> These days there have been a huge resurgence of various retro
> communities around the world.  There are still tons of new programs
> and games being published for 8-bit micro's or Amiga's.  Still it
> appears the Unix community in general is not part of that movement.  I
> think TUHS is an exception and a haven for people who just prefer the
> old ways.  I find Unix these days too bloated and moved away from its
> main core values: simplicity and minimalism.  The hardware was much
> simpler too back in the days.
>
> Long live the ed(1) and vi(1).
>
> --Andy
>

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

[Rob Pike]

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For the kids on my lawn, ed(1) is a whole man page of humor.

I thought that "special character" trope was written by dmr. He certainly
loved it. Also didn't it originate in something about regular expressions,
like the ed or grep page? Doug can confirm.

-rob


On Thu, Mar 11, 2021 at 7:18 AM Ken Thompson <kenbob@gmail.com> wrote:

>
> back to original title - manual humour.
> my favorite was in the "form" command.
> -- credit to mcilroy.
>
> "If one of the special characters [{]}\ is preceded
> by a \, it loses its special character."
>
>
> On Wed, Mar 10, 2021 at 11:50 AM Andy Kosela <akosela@andykosela.com>
> wrote:
>
>> On 3/10/21, Andreas Kusalananda Kähäri <andreas.kahari@abc.se> wrote:
>> > On Tue, Mar 09, 2021 at 06:51:56PM -0500, Steve Nickolas wrote:
>> >> On Wed, 10 Mar 2021, Rob Pike wrote:
>> >>
>> >> > I'm curious when people (other than me) erred and stopped saying that
>> >> > ed
>> >> > was the standard editor.
>> >> >
>> >> > -rob
>> >> >
>> >>
>> >> I actually use that expression in somewhat unorthodox ways. ;)
>> >>
>> >> Like "CDE is the standard desktop environment like ed is the standard
>> >> text
>> >> editor." (I still consider both to be true even though about no one
>> uses
>> >> either anymore.)
>> >>
>> >> -uso.
>> >
>> > Hi, I'm "about no one".  I use ed(1) every once in a while, both the
>> > way it was supposed to be used, i.e. interactively, and occasionally
>> > scripted on smaller documents.
>> >
>> > I'm soon 50.  Having grown up with computers, and having spent most of
>> > my money as a student buying the next bigger and/or faster PC, I find
>> > that I nowadays enjoy smaller, slower systems and simpler editors more
>> > and more.  Getting distracted by syntax highligting, confused by too
>> > complicated configurations... There is a certain beauty in the editing
>> > language of ed(1).  It's minimalistic and restrictive, and therefore
>> > forces you to think, to remember, and to be creative.
>>
>> This comment resonates with me so much.  I am enjoying these days
>> mostly retro systems too -- computers I grew up with.  There is a
>> certain beauty in the term "less is more".  And nothing is more
>> satisfying than sitting in front of a CRT terminal (either some real
>> terminal or PC) and working in a full screen text mode.  No GUIs, no
>> distractions -- just pure conversation with a machine using only text.
>> That's UNIX for me.
>>
>> These days there have been a huge resurgence of various retro
>> communities around the world.  There are still tons of new programs
>> and games being published for 8-bit micro's or Amiga's.  Still it
>> appears the Unix community in general is not part of that movement.  I
>> think TUHS is an exception and a haven for people who just prefer the
>> old ways.  I find Unix these days too bloated and moved away from its
>> main core values: simplicity and minimalism.  The hardware was much
>> simpler too back in the days.
>>
>> Long live the ed(1) and vi(1).
>>
>> --Andy
>>
>

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

[George Michaelson]

I Still use ed periodically.  Less often, but sometimes.

Sometimes, its for nostalgia. It never lasts. The past isn't as rosy
as we like to think it was. You have to be very confident you know
what your doing, to not wind up saying p a lot, to "see" it. It
demands you think.

Sometimes, it's for functionality. You kind of know you could do this
in sed, but, you aren't 100% sure, ed means you can "look" at some
/match lines and then craft the s/pat/repl/ and wq and go home. Thats
kind of using p too.

Sometimes, it's for expediency. You stuffed up. Nothing else seems to
work. This editor works. Hammer, screw.. good enough. Ed can cope with
very large data better than some alternatives. Less litter. I hate
finding .swp files and vi -r is frankly disgusting. Its indeterminite
what it is r(ecovering) from. don't get me started on #file or file~
trash either.

I loved ed, and I lived in ed far more than ex/vi until about 1985/6
when something flipped. I think its possible, that vi muscle memory
took over, and jove/gosmacs/emacs became too confusing (I had flirted
with this but not coding LISP made it silly, I was really only using
the keystroke-recording macro to do dirty edits by "yea, same as the
last time" tricks)

Mike Lesk showed me MGR. I actually got really depressed at that
point. I felt like I'd been working under a rock, not understanding
what was possible. Sunview kind of also sucked me in, with an emphasis
on Sucked because it did. Not really about the editor, but the whole
"ok THIS is what efficient looks like" combined with tiling and other
things, it just made ed sort-of walk into the background a bit. Hard
to focus when you're being offered a vision of 4D hypercube projected
onto a 2D surface. I didn't stick on MGR. It was too off-beam of what
other people around me were doing. I was asked if I could fix some
minor nits in it, thats when I realised I lacked fundamental clue (it
is also why I seem to be the only person I know who doesn't totally
hate the idea of the google 'be this smart to enter' testing: It
obviously DOES work to weed some people out)

Socialised aspects of "what editor do you use" can't be
under-estimated, for anyone who is essentially using tools not writing
them. If you wrote an editor, you probably got to the right place
faster. If you use one, you wind up being 10 years in before you ask
yourself "how does infinite undo work really" and learn about things
like Merkle trees or whatever. Editors do a lot.

-G

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

[Will Senn]

On 3/10/21 9:54 PM, George Michaelson wrote:
> I Still use ed periodically.  Less often, but sometimes.
>
>
Thanks for reflecting on ed. It was interesting to hear your 
perspective. I love ed. I was only introduced to it a little over 6 
years or so ago, but it's a beautiful thing. Of course, I use vi as my 
command line editor of choice :), but that doesn't diminish my enjoyment 
of using ed. I'm just way more comfortable in vi/vim. Interestingly, 
when I first learned there was such a thing as ed, I just figured it was 
unix's version of edlin, thankfully this wasn't even close to reality. 
Ed's regex support seems to be very straightforward yet quite powerful, 
and the small command set makes it simple to remember.

- will

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

[John Cowan]

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On Tue, Mar 9, 2021 at 5:31 PM Rob Pike <robpike@gmail.com> wrote:

I'm curious when people (other than me) erred and stopped saying that ed
> was the standard editor.
>

They haven't.  When a vi vs. Emacs (vel sim.) argument is swirling around
me, I explain that ex(1) is the editor I use.  People say "But ed(1) is the
standard editor!"  To which I reply, "Yes, but I'm willing to trade a
little standardosity for a little convenience."




John Cowan          http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan        cowan@ccil.org
I Hope, Sir, that we are not mutually Un-friended by this Difference
which hath happened betwixt us.
     --Thomas Fuller, Appeal of Injured Innocence (1659)

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