U'll Be King of the Stars writes: > This has gotten me thinking about whether line-based editing is really > the best abstraction for simple editors.
Yes. Yes it is. You can prise ed out of my cold dead hands. I don't get where the desire for an editor in the installer comes from. If you have even the barest scraps of a system you can boot a full kernel and get a much richer environment to work in. The installer kernel itself contains much of what's necessary to run the installed binaries. boot -s. It's a thing. If any tools should be added to the installer it's something for network interrogation because that gives you more scope for dealing with odd scenarios *before* you have an installed system, but what's already there was apparently enough to get over whatever that problem was I encountered. > > The power of ed is in the regular expressions, search and substitution. The power of ed comes from the power of unix that it runs within not any particular string matching technique. It is a simple tool which does one thing, does it well, operates as a pipeline on text streams, etc. It would still have that power with any other string matching technology or even some other obscure addressing mode. > I assumed that the canonical reference for ed was K&P, "The Unix > Programming Environment". But since then I have discovered this book: > > https://mwl.io/nonfiction/tools#ed > > When I return home I will buy it. (I'm overseas at the moment.) > > What are some other good books for learning ed? How about online > resources, e.g., FTP sites with collections of interesting scripts. I assumed the canonical reference for ed was ed(1). Well I guess the canonical reference would be the contents of /usr/src/bin/ed but I'm not about to go trawling through that when there's some stellar documentation sitting right there. > I'm particularly interested in its history, usage idioms, different > implementations, multilingual capabilities, and using it as a vehicle > for mastering regular expressions to the point that they are second nature. I would recommend perl for this, not ed. ed it a text editor. Perl is a pattern matching engine with a turing complete programming environment hanging off the back of it. It's adapted (some might say warped) the language that represents regular expressions in strange ways but the machinery that's been built around it is fantastically easy to use in a "get out of the way" sense, leaving you to concentrate on the arcana of regular expressions. Deciding why one would want to do that is left as an exercise for the reader. But absolutely do keep on top of the differences between perl's regexes and regular regular expressions as described in re_format(7). Matthew
