# ed vi vim sam vis editor

I have been on a bit of an editor tour over the past week or so,
after being initially inspired to look more closely at ed.

Getting to know ed a little has been a bit of an enlightenment to
me. As a long time vim user I was left feeling that I had been using
it all wrong!

Going further down the rabbit hole lead me to install and do some
experimentation with sam[1]. I hated the GUI, but with the -d flag
you can use it much like ed on steroids. Here is a quick reference
to its command language[2].


## Structured regular expressions

Once you have seen these[3] in action you can not simply continue to
use an editor without. Rather than working with lines you are working
with precicely constrained regions of your document. Only a
demonstration[4] can do it justice.

This eventually lead me to looking for some happy middle ground
between the minimalism of ed, the functionality I had become
accustomed to with vim along with the power of sam.


## vis

vis[5] is not a fork of vi or vim. It is a ground up reimagining of
vi combined with the power of sam's command language. It feels more
like a UNIX tool, even the text reformatting is a call to '|fmt'.

Something that always bothered me about vim was that, modal editing
could be enjoyed while working on your document, but in the command
mode you were back to plain old typewriter. This is not the case
with vis, which allows you to modal edit your command line. This is
a real boon for me as I use vim bindings and modal text entry
wherever I can get it.

There are some things which have bothered me, but it's too early
to tell if these are long term issues or just teething problems
because it is not vim. It is however a fraction of the size of vim
and proving to be a very capable editor.


## Historical knowledge

For those who were there at the beginning and learned ed while using
teletypes a certain way of working became established and when later
tools came along those established ways developed along with the
tools.

For people that have come along since, maybe coming from a
different paradigm for editing text such as using WYSIWG word
processors and editors, we come with baggage.

I learned to use vi, an then vim, by myself without anyone to give
me pointers and that has resulted in my use of it being very much
as a visual editor with lots of hjkl scrolling around to make changes
to parts of the text as you would in a word processor.


## Conclusion

Had I started with ed the story would have been very much different.
Having spent just a little time learning ed, it has made me aware
of the following.

I very rarely made use of the search feature to jump to words, line
ranges to constrain or widen the scope of my commands , regex search
and replace or the ability to send parts, or all, of a file for
processing by external programs. And this is where the real power
lies.

PS. This document was produced in vis.


## References

[1](http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/sam/)
[2](http://sam.cat-v.org/cheatsheet/)
[3](http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/sam_lang_tutorial/sam_tut.pdf)
[4](https://www.youtube.com/embed/VZo_F60oqbI)
[5](https://sr.ht/~martanne/vis/)

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