Usual lurk mode -> off On many *nix systems, using something like "ls -li" (the "i" displays the inode number in the filesystem) will show you that "vi" and "ed" are actually the same binary program -- just hard-linked together. The name used to invoke it (argv[0]) determines whether it goes into "vi" mode or "ed" mode. I heard a rumor once -- that Bill Joy had a whole bunch of vi improvements in the hopper, but lost those due to a disk crash with no backup. Additional "Data Nugget": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vi Usual lurk mode -> on On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 10:20 AM, Daniel Taylor <random at argle.org> wrote: > For those who do not know. > > Before there was vi there were ed (the line editor) and sed (the stream > editor). > > In the days of paper terminals ed was the ultimate interactive text > editor, you could (in theory) write your thesis using it. I'm sure > someone did, because college students are That Way (that, and you could > save a backup copy and pay someone with a nice typewriter and decent > typing speed to make it pretty for you if you had more money than most > college students). > > sed was (and perhaps still is) the ultimate non-interactive text editor. > You feed it a script (on the command line or in a file), and a stream or > file of text and it outputs the text as modified by the script. There > are those who would swear by awk or even perl for this menial task, but > sed does many things gracefully and efficiently with much less of a load > on your poor beleaguered CPU and memory. > > And finally, in the fullness of time and the wide deployment of glass > tty's to computer labs, we gained access to vi. My first response to it > was "cool! It runs just like ed but I get to see 23 lines at a time! > Ooooooh!", then as I used it I discovered that it had it's own command > set that gave capabilities that just didn't make sense in ed or sed. > > ed lives on, though to my knowledge nobody uses it outside of vi colon > mode. > > sed is in moderately wide use in batch processing applications still, > especially for minor data format conversions or weird command line scripts. > > vi (especially as vim) is a living project, competitive with any other > editor, and nearly an IDE in it's own right when invoked as gvim. > > Why did I go to all this trouble? > > Since ed and sed still live in vi as part of colon mode, learning their > command set can greatly enhance what you can do with vi, as well as > giving you tools to use in XTreme Sysadmin! situations. > > That, and I was just really in the mood to write this morning... > > -- > Dan > > _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20100831/29843d28/attachment.htm