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   Chris Siebenmann (cks@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 05-Dec-2025 07:38:23 JST Chris Siebenmann

   in reply to

   • rk: it’s hyphen-minus actually
   • Tim Chase

   @gumnos @rk As a sysadmin, I see and feel the appeal behind fast start/quick editing, but I've found that ed doesn't work for me because (I think) it requires me to keep too much context in my head. Visual editors give me visible context for me to readily work in, and with a stock/minimal vim setup they start and operate fast enough for me.

   (I have a big, slow start editor environment for big editing. That's GNU Emacs, not vim.)

   • Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Tim Chase (gumnos@mastodon.bsd.cafe)'s status on Friday, 05-Dec-2025 07:38:25 JST Tim Chase

     • ed(1) conference

     Though a bit niche, my #FreeSoftwareAdvent today is ed(1). As the goofball behind @ed1conf, I certainly play it up, but I certainly use it more than the average Unix/BSD/Linux user.

     A while ago I wrote up list of reasons¹ why one might use ed, and some are more obscure/improbable reasons (though I've encountered all of them in that post), there are a couple of those that drive me back to ed regularly:

     • I can still see the output of previous commands on the screen while I edit, where a full-screen editor would obscure that output that I need to incorporate in my edit

     • it's just darn fast for a quick edit, changing a variable name or adding/removing an entry in a list, etc. No startup costs for a honkin' huge $VISUAL with dozens of plugins and language-server processes and GUI rendering

     • very usable on low-bandwith/high-latency connections like I sometimes get when I remote into machines (less of a problem now, but I still experience sessions where I'll SSH in, invoke ed, make the change, write & quit, and exit the shell, in a couple seconds, while the screen repaints things oh-so-slowly

     • and most importantly, there's quality geek-cred for using it in front of others 😆

     ⸻
     ¹ https://blog.thechases.com/posts/cli/why-ed1/