Version 1.8 of GNU ed released

[sramsay]

"* Ed now stops reading stdin when reaching real End Of File the first time. (Before it needed to reach EOF twice)."

Once? You've gotta be kidding. In older, hardcore versions, ed would BLOW RIGHT PAST your first EOF. It would say, "So long, sucka!" to your first EOF. It would assume you weren't serious with that first one, BECAUSE YOU WEREN'T.

What ed was looking for was EOT (end of tape). Because that was serious. When it saw EOF, it thought, "Oh, for fuck's sake. It's amateur hour." Now ed is apparently all about "user friendliness."

This is bullshit.

[kps]

Made me look. Real ed(1) exits on the first EOF.

[1] http://www.tuhs.org/ [2] http://puszcza.gnu.org.ua/software/apout/

[dhimes]

Thank you. You made my morning.

[cema]

A great example of a joke which works in HN. Some don't but this one does. Thank you.

[hosay123]

It's worth avoiding linking to Google Groups entirely, on the basis that the new UI is unusable and that the product will probably be canned soon enough.

GMane is a good community-oriented alternate:

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.fsf.announce/1952

[zurn]

ed is actually really handy in shell scripts when you want change something in a text file, and want to navigate in the text by following landmarks. Eg. if you are editing an .ini file the sed or awk methods are much more cumbersome, with ed it's just a couple of navigation commands and a in-place replace and save.

Plus you get to try things out interactively and then paste the working set of commands in your script. it's like sed with a repl, only better!

Example: https://groups.google.com/group/comp.unix.shell/msg/e823e275...

[philh]

That breaks if the file to include contains a line with just a ., unfortunately. But it's still ridiculously simple, and that's likely not to be a problem in a lot of cases.

[ultimoo]

This is really cool, thanks!

[geocar]

A while ago I "minimally ported" the V6 ed to modern systems:

* http://geocar.sdf1.org/ed.c

* http://geocar.sdf1.org/ed.c.orig

I actually prefer ed/ex to screen editors when doing quick fixes because I can still see what's in the terminal (although I still use both emacs and vi as well).

[gnuvince]

I use a shell inside Emacs, so I just split my frame.

[asdfs]

I found this blog post to be an excellent ingroduction to ed, for the uninitiated: http://blog.sanctum.geek.nz/actually-using-ed/

And of course there's the obligatory: http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.txt

[jdale27]

"Ed is the standard text editor."

[michaellacorte]

"Ed, the greatest WYGIWYG editor of all."

The first time I read this, I almost fell out of my chair in laughter.

[rquantz]

Is this what you're referring to?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5246071

[Mr_T_]

But does it have syntax highlighting?

[EliRivers]

It certainly does. On my system, the whole syntax is highlighted a sort of off-white against a black background.

[aeonflux]

But does it have multiple cursors?

[mhd]

You need 'ex' for that, if you can stand the bloat.

[RBerenguel]

One for each term tab. Or tmux/screen session. How cool is that!?