Am 05.11.15 um 01:42 schrieb Chris Angelico:
On Thu, Nov 5, 2015 at 6:38 AM, Christian Gollwitzer <[email protected]> wrote:
As someone who grew up on MS-DOS, I'd like to mention that EDLIN's
value wasn't in the obvious places. There were two features it had
that most other editors didn't: firstly, it would read only as much of
the file as it needed, so you could edit a file larger than available
memory; and secondly, all commands came from stdin, which could be
redirected - making it a poor man's 'sed'. Using EDLIN for regular
file editing was never the normal thing.
I also grew up with MSDOS, albeit some later version (3.0 was the first,
I think I remember). I knew that EDLIN existed, but never ever have used
it. On my first "own" (actually my father's) machine, the Amstrad
PC1512, there was a preinstalled GUI working environment called GEM from
Digital Research. The DOS commandline was used for configuring and
booting the system, but never for editing files. I had used copy con: to
create a file. If I'm not mistaken, DR shipped some "visual" editor for
DOS with it as an addition.
The point I'm so amused is, that MS has not felt the need to ship a real
editor, and also cut back on most of the other tools that make
computing, even on commandlines, a pleasant experience. Readline?
Tab-Completion? I read a magazine called "DOS", where they scripted the
hell out of .BAT-files. When they first showed an article about bash
programming, I was really jealous that the people on these strange,
exotic OSes had such a complete programming language at their disposal.
Now I can't imagine giving it back ever.
Fast forward a decade or two, and I'm working on a MUD server for a
friend. It incorporates an editor that can be used on a dumb telnet
connection - and it's line based again. So there's clearly some value
here :) Visual editors get the lion's share of actual editing work,
but in special circumstances, it is nice to have a quick little
ed-like program around.
In this case I'd copy the file to the local machine and sync it using
rsync or git. It's almost as terse in terms of bandwidth as the manual
editing commands, but a lot more comfortable.
Christian
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