Ironically I’m studying all the oldest of oldest UNIX utilities that can work well over a pure teletype style terminal, think a LA34 DECwriter IV. No ncurses, no TUI. only line feeds and also ink is scarce.

Why? Because we have a new friend in the house who effectively has to interact with the outside world via teletype terminal.

The LLMs!

A great point, but even over a teletype you'd use "ex", not "ed".

Totally true! Thank you for reminding me of ex.

sed and vi both have roots in ed, right? So you only needed one more round of advancement from ed to reach peak computing.

I mean we’re all joking in this thread to some extent, but actually, I don’t know that I don’t believe this.

> sed and vi both have roots in ed

A joke I used to tell people is "don't know how to quit vi? Just type Q to enter Ex mode, then you can exit vi just like how you would exit ed."

Clearly the solution is :!killall vi or something along those lines.

Curious: Why would you use ed over ex, or vi for that matter?

"ed" is easier to type than "ex" but mostly it's a matter of habit. On some systems, /bin/ed is a separate binary but /usr/bin/ex is actually just a symlink to vim, and at that point I might as well run vim.

As to why I run "ed" instead of "vi": if I get just a few errors from some script I just copied over, I could run "ed" and the error message is still on the screen (because ed doesn't repaint the whole screen). I would run vi and screen if I expect to fix more than just a few lines.

makes sense