seifert@ihuxl.UUCP (08/18/83)
Add one more vote in favor of 'ed'. Ed is quite powerful and
can do all sorts of nifty stuff if you will just use the power
built into it. At Purdue there were some modifications which
made it even nicer. There was a 'm' command which would toggle
on and off the special meaning of the metacharacters. This made
life a little more sane for novices, and saved wear and tear
on the '\' key for more knowledgeable types. The wonderous
':' command would display a screenful of text starting with
the current line. And so on. Very disappointing when I came
to work for the "control-g system" and discovered how many
of my favorite things about UNIX (*) weren't in standard UNIX.
So how nice any given tool is depends on what version you're using.
And what you're running it on, and the response time.
I'm currently learning emacs, some things are easier, others
are apparently more difficult to do in emacs than in ed.
Dave ("REAL unix hackers use ed") Seifert
ihnp4!ihuxl!seifert
* Bell Laboratories is a trademark of the UNIX operating system :-)