> ed is very similar, but it doesn't come with a nice manual
In many case it indeed doesn't. Historically, that documentation void was meant to be filled by learn tutorials[1] and a written introduction in volume 2A of the manual[2,3]. Unfortunately, the learn tutorials can't really be made use of in a modern environment; you’d actually have to set up a PDP-11 emulator with V7 (though prebuilt images exist) and work with that, an environment where backspace doesn’t really work out of the box.
OpenBSD ed(1)[4] tries, but it's just not quite there as an introduction.
[1] http://a.papnet.eu/UNIX/v7/files/doc/07_learn.pdf
[2] http://a.papnet.eu/UNIX/v7/files/doc/04_edtut.pdf
25 pages that could be shown in one page if they skipped all the talk and just showed carefully selected examples .
Re:Batch editing files with ed
by yjftsjthsd-h on Saturday May 12, 2018 @02:28PM
(#17055336)
That seems to be the theme of all info pages, and most GNU manpages. I suppose it beats no docs at least.
My understanding is that man/info is meant more as a reference and less like a first time users guide.
After spending 5 minutes with the manual, I realized it was the best line editor I've ever used.
ed is very similar, but it doesn't come with a nice manual. The info page is chaotic and doesn't start from the beginning. You can cover typical usage in 5 lines, but no, you have to read through 25 pages of stuff just to figure out a sensible command. I just use vim or nano.