On Tue, Jul 27, 2021 at 12:43 PM Bob Proulx <b...@proulx.com> wrote:
> Not that long ago, well it was pre-pandemic times when we used to > meet-up in person, I used ed to rescue a friend's Ubuntu laptop that > he had messed up while at the meet-up! He had no functional editor > that we could find other than ed. I don't know why but he had the > packaged ed installed. I am guessing some DE dependency pulled in a > dependency and on down the line and ed was installed. I was able to > use ed to rescue his system! No amount of local custom building could > have worked in that situation. > No. But I am talking about a run-time option, not a config-time option (although a config-time option to disable --pcre would make sense for low-disk or low-memory configurations). > Expanding ed to include creeping features is an insidious path. Where > does it stop? Well, I don't know: it's a matter of taste. Research Unix never had the -p option or P command, and neither did any BSD version up to 4.3, so someone had to add it so that it got into Posix and GNU ed. Was that a creeping feature? On the other hand these versions did have the x command and option (changed to X in 8th Edition and later) to decrypt files on input and encrypt them on output. That didn't make it into Posix, but it would make a lot of sense when editing a file on NFS or other shared filesystems: it seems like it's a feature that crept away. If Emacs or Vim are the obvious goals then why not > simply use Emacs/Vim now? Why try to mutate ed to be down that path > instead of simply using the editor that supports these features in the > first place? And also if so then why start with ed instead of editors > like nano that are already further along the path to that goal? > > > It's unlikely you'd type such an extension by mistake, unlike (say) ed > -P. > > > > I already use alias ed=ed -p '* ' because I like prompts, but if I'm > > running an ed script, I use \ed <foo.ed. > > This is not really the same thing. Because these are features that > are portably available in every version of ed. > > Bob > >