In praise of the convenience and speed of the editor ed
    =======================================================

 Last edited: $Date: 2021/05/13 20:31:30 $


                       Life in plain text
                       ------------------

 First some background.

 ### Vi and Vim

 I  have  been  using Vi and Vim for more than two decades, for
 most of the stuff I write.

 All in all I guess that I spend at least six hours per day  in
 Vi  and  in  Vim.The Vi and Vim keys are engraved in my muscle
 memory, and I issue most edit commands automatically,  without
 thinking about it.

 ### ed

 In 2018 I discovered ed and decided to invest time in it.

 I  have learned how to use ed and use it almost daily for many
 small  editing  tasks.  Currently   I   am   feeling   totally
 comfortable in ed.

 ### Emacs and Micro Emacs

 Some  time  ago I decided that I wanted to learn to use Emacs.
 My  motivation  for  this  started  when  I  discovered   that
 extensions like rec-mode and ledger-mode are much more capable
 than the plugins for Vim. Also I want to learn more to program
 in  Forth  and  in  Lisp,  and for both Emacs can be used as a
 great REPL.

 I decided to go for the vanilla Emacs key bindings and started
 learning  to  use those. I have been using vanilla Emacs for a
 couple of months now.

 Putting the adagio *"Do or do not. There  is  no  try."*  into
 practice,  I  moved  my tasks from Taskwarrior to org mode and
 use Emacs daily for several editing jobs.  Slowly I am getting
 more  fluent  in  the  use  of  it.  I  am  still  not feeling
 comfortable enough in Emacs, but it gets better every day.

 Also I am mixing my use of Emacs with the use of mg.  Mg is  a
 Micro  Emacs  that  is part of the default OpenBSD install, is
 small and fast and feels a bit  less  intimidating  than  full
 blown Emacs.

 For  fun  I  also  started  to fool around in some other Micro
 Emacs variants, JOVE and uemacs.

                            Using ed
                            --------

 Yesterday  I  had  to  quickly  test  some  installation-  and
 configuration  notes for an application on a Raspberry Pi.  To
 make sure these notes are 100% correct, I dd-ed a  new,  fresh
 image  of Raspberry Pi OS Lite to a micro SD-card, and started
 from there.

 This means editing the config file to get a serial console  on
 the  UART,  creating  a  wpa_supplicant.conf  and  editing the
 network interfaces file, and so on.

 After the Raspberry Pi 3 A+ booted  and  had  a  working  WiFi
 connection, I edited the fstab file, did an apt-get update and
 apt-get upgrade and started  installing  and  configuring  the
 application, set up NGINX as a reverse proxy, et cetera. After
 that I wrote the configuration scripts,  created  a  file  for
 systemd and so on.

 For all this, I only used one editor: ed.

 I did this without thinking about it.

 This has become my normal reflex.

 Maybe  I would think twice before writing from scratch a large
 text file in ed. But for these  tasks,  creating  and  editing
 configuration  files.  adding small changes to existing files,
 make some quick adjustments here and there, nothing beats  the
 convenience  and  speed of ed. It really has become a habit to
 use ed for these tasks.

 rlwrap does make working in ed much more convenient, but  most
 of the time, mostly due to muscle memory, I forget to enter it
 at the command line.

                           Love of ed
                           ----------

 Of course, Vi, Vim, Emacs and the Micro Emacs are all  capable
 editors.   And  I  do  use these editors, certainly for larger
 tasks like writing an article or a memo.

 But in the last few years, I have come to love ed.

 I like the elegance of a very small editor.

 Ed is old,  it goes all the way back to the very first days of
 Unix, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_(text_editor)


 In  the  seventies,  George Coulouris[1]  created  em[2],  the
 "Editor  for  Mortals",  as  a  reaction  to  ed.
 So,  ed  is  apparently  not  for  everybody.  But  I  love it.

 [1]: ]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Coulouris_(computer_scientist)
 [2]: http://www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/~gc/history/,

 Ed may be old, but it is very capable.  I am in  awe   by  the
 power that ed provides, and I really do like using it.

 For  me,  ed  gives  us  a  glimpse  of  the  genious  of [Ken
 Thompson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Thompson).

 For small editing tasks, make some minor adjustments  to  text
 files,  but  also  for  creating  and  editing text files like
 configuration files, nothing can beat the speed of ed.