Writing text

How do you prefer to write text


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... I was fairly baffled when ed was removed from Debian for the sole reason cited that "users wouldn't find it shocking if it was removed".
Certainly found vi on every un*x I've ever used. It was the only editor available to us on AIX in 1990, so we had no choice but to learn it. DEC, SCO, Red Hat, Slackware, Debian, Ubuntu, and Mint all had it too. Older systems made us retype the whole line just to change a single character, with the exceptions of some Hazeltine terminals' with "line editor" mode, and MUSIC system's panel editor terms.
That may be the case. I don't know that.
I never installed FreeBSD via some script I downloaded from github.
I always install from an iso-file on an usb-stick I've downloaded from freebsd.org.
Also there within .cshrc EDITOR is set to vi.
But when I type edit in the shell or do something else which automatically brings up the file with a texteditor, by default ee is loaded.
I just can tell what I observe.
Thanks for pointing that out. I've never used edit before. /usr/bin/ee and /usr/bin/edit are two separate files, but identical. Doesn't seem to have too many features, but easy to use, and would do the trick in a pinch.

For programming purposes it would be well worth learning vi instead. JMO Same goes for /bin/ed. Having learned vi, might as well use the best editor available, and vi is the one.
 
Older systems made us retype the whole line just to change a single character, with the exceptions of some Hazeltine terminals' with "line editor" mode, and MUSIC system's panel editor terms.
Eeek. I have only had a play with some of these things and in my experience, it would just seem like the dark days of computers. I would get so frustrated but I suppose if you work with them daily, you get used to it(?). Even today, I find ed (and ex) great for scripting, but as a day to day driver, I always gravitate back to vi.

I suppose I was lucky that I started with DOS with Watcom Vi (feels like a weird mix of (n)vi and vim) and IBM's editor for PC-DOS called 'E'. I had it easy* ;)

* other than the fact that all the DOS Extenders for Watcom Vi (dos4g/w) and DJGPP (cwsdpmi) would conflict and cause all sorts of mess making calling the compiler from Vi's :shell flaky as hell.
 
kpedersen
I don't have the problem.
On all my systems vi/Vim is the default editor.

But I just have to change that, because without any changes by default ee is brought up.
Yes, although in /.cshrs and /root/.cshrc is written:
setenv EDITOR vi
Don't ask me why, by default ee comes up.

And I don't know how it works within Linux, because I never looked that "deeply" in any Linux-Distribution.
I never even looked for any kind of .bashrc or looked into it.


@hardworking newbie
The Joke is very good. ("Userfriendly" is always good. There is also one contained in O'Reilley's "learning the vi and Vim editors")
So I am not the only one who hated those useless, stupid and annoying only MS Paperclips :))
 
You forgot sam and acme.
Indeed.
Thanks for pointing that out!

I cannot say anything about them, because I never worked with neither of them.
But looking at the names listed on the wikpediapage who all used those, they cannot be bad.
 
"Other user-level programs, services and utilities include awk, echo, ed, vi, and hundreds of others."

Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_UNIX_Specification#2018_Edition


Neither FreeBSD nor Linux are registered under the Single Unix Specification.
Reading through the wikipedia link, macOS is no longer a proper UNIX. And, it looks like a given FreeBSD machine can achieve SUS/POSIX compliance just by installing some pre-packaged ports. But I'm flabbergasted that macOS was ever considered a UNIX at all - it's about as antithetical to UNIX proper as it gets. Command line takes some getting used to, but macOS totally treats it like something you shouldn't even think of looking at, much less use.
 
macOS is no longer a proper UNIX. And, it looks like a given FreeBSD machine can achieve SUS/POSIX compliance just by installing some pre-packaged ports.
Once you get rid of the naff UI system of macOS, it is fairly capable as a UNIX platform. Possibly the most tenuous part is that it provides chroot but it is almost impossible to utilise because the rest of the platform is not portable / modular (probably launchd being poorly designed). I am actually a little surprised this didn't affect certification.

But it seems they paid for the UNIX test / registration so I guess they get it. Some Linuxes (i.e Inspur, based on Red Hat) are also UNIX certified. FreeBSD could easily get certified if it was worth the cost which admittedly doesn't provide much benefit.

Since Apple lost interest in servers, I wonder what the benefit of UNIX certification provides. Most typical Apple consumers don't even know what it is.
 
But it seems they paid for the UNIX test / registration so I guess they get it. Some Linuxes (i.e Inspur, based on Red Hat) are also UNIX certified. FreeBSD could easily get certified if it was worth the cost which admittedly doesn't provide much benefit.
Well, color me mildly surprised, considering that UNIX is mostly a server OS, and macOS is a desktop OS. Looking at it that way, it doesn't make much sense for Apple to get UNIX certification for macOS, even with the code lineage.
 
Reading through the wikipedia link, macOS is no longer a proper UNIX. And, it looks like a given FreeBSD machine can achieve SUS/POSIX compliance just by installing some pre-packaged ports. But I'm flabbergasted that macOS was ever considered a UNIX at all - it's about as antithetical to UNIX proper as it gets. Command line takes some getting used to, but macOS totally treats it like something you shouldn't even think of looking at, much less use.
I still have a Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard "Macbook" which was their first SUS registered version. It's considered SUS-compliant because it can compile SUS-compliant code. Using its native bash shell, I've compiled PHP, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and PureFTP with it, along with a few other things I can no longer remember off the top of my head. I didn't want to pay for Apple upgrades so I don't use it anymore, but I still have it. It has a hybrid NeXT project XNU kernel which is itself a mashup of the 4.3BSD and Mach kernels. After Apple bought NeXT they spent a ton of money on it and stirred in some additional code from FreeBSD and the Open Software Foundation's OSF/1 kernels. This was a big expensive feather in their cap, and put a lot of distance between Apple and Microsoft's Windows OS which was still pretty hobbyist-level at the time. So XNU -> Darwin OS -> MacOS, iOS, iPadOS, Apple TV, and so forth -- all this stuff still has a bit of BSD in it, and owes a lot to POSIX.
Well, color me mildly surprised, considering that UNIX is mostly a server OS, and macOS is a desktop OS. Looking at it that way, it doesn't make much sense for Apple to get UNIX certification for macOS, even with the code lineage.
I think it all has much more to do with software standards compliance than it does with any sort of server vs. workstation dichotomy.
 
Well, color me mildly surprised, considering that UNIX is mostly a server OS, and macOS is a desktop OS.
Back in the day Apple used to do actual server versions of Mac OS X
https://landonf.org/static/images/tiger_vmware_patched.png

Now, they just have some random server utilities installed from the AppStore (yuck). https://www.apple.com/uk/macos/server/

I guess it is quite a good example of the fact that there is rarely such thing as a Desktop vs Server operating system. An OS can be used as either (as many do with FreeBSD).
 
Back in the day Apple used to do actual server versions of Mac OS X
https://landonf.org/static/images/tiger_vmware_patched.png

Now, they just have some random server utilities installed from the AppStore (yuck). https://www.apple.com/uk/macos/server/

I guess it is quite a good example of the fact that there is rarely such thing as a Desktop vs Server operating system. An OS can be used as either (as many do with FreeBSD).
I actually remember OS X Server... it never really took off, not even in places that were dyed-in-the-wool Mac shops. And, even if an OS can be used as either, it has to be able to handle the duties. An OS may be installed on capable hardware, but it may not be able to properly juggle the threads of process execution. Sure, the software flaw is fixable, but the fix may be difficult to apply. A capable server is, IMHO, a bit of a 'marriage' between quality hardware and software that can actually take advantage of the hardware features. Progress has been made to separate the two, and you can install FreeBSD on consumer-grade desktop hardware, but the said desktop hardware cannot exactly handle the duties of being a web server, even if you install all the right software. Looking at it in reverse (In a ridiculous theoretical scenario), a Xeon can easily handle a Win98 install, but Win98 is unable to take advantage of all the features a Xeon offers.
 
+1 for sed(1). Real men do editing in one pass.

The ICL 1900 had a one-pass "stream editor" called XMED. It used punched cards to edit a text file on disk or drum. I used it, a lot.
When I was in a hurry (no time to send coding sheets to the typing pool), I even punched the cards myself on a small portable machine.

ed(1) was an absolute delight by comparison. I'm still extremely fond of it, and routinely use it in ex(1) mode.

The advantage of learning ed(1) is that the mysteries of sed(1), grep(1), and even the regular expression bestiary of perl(1) unfold in all their glory.
 
On 2.11 BSD:

ED(1) General Commands Manual ED(1)

NAME
ed - text editor

SYNOPSIS
ed [ - ] [ name ]

DESCRIPTION
Ed is the standard text editor.

On Plan9:

ED(1) General Commands Manual ED(1)

NAME
ed - text editor

SYNOPSIS
ed [ - ] [ -o ] [ file ]

DESCRIPTION
Ed is a venerable text editor.

On FreeBSD 13.0

ED(1) FreeBSD General Commands Manual ED(1)

NAME
ed, red -- text editor

SYNOPSIS
ed [-] [-s] [-p string] [file]
red [-] [-s] [-p string] [file]

DESCRIPTION
The ed utility is a line-oriented text editor. It is used to create,
display, modify and otherwise manipulate text files. ....

It went from "the standard text editor" to "a venerable text editor" for ending just as an "utility" that happens to be "a line oriented text editor".
 
I am running it on a small server, I am not happy, but I do not know a better Linux alternative. Do you know one?
Well... if it does the job for you all is fine. It's just that for me that Debian had enough times in the past some weird compile settings for some packages, which really was unfun. Also that sometimes what they do consider as "recent" versions are in reality quite ancient.

If you can install whatever you want: why not use FreeBSD instead? Runs great. If you are stuck with Linux: Devuan is also there, which is Debian minus Systemd. Or instead CentOS, if you want/need something more enterprisy-ish.
 
If you can install whatever you want: why not use FreeBSD instead? Runs great. If you are stuck with Linux: Devuan is also there, which is Debian minus Systemd. Or instead CentOS, if you want/need something more enterprisy-ish.
It is a small virtual server, preconfigured by the provider, cannot run neither FreeBSD nor OpenBSD.
I have no problems compiling, but packages are practical. I do not want to waste too much time on
the system. Mater of taste if you like it. Debian is more lightweight than other.
 
I used Debian to learn systems/network administration when I was in college - that's what the instructor picked for the class. We (students and instructor) did have lively discussions about merits of one distro over another, but the point was to learn stuff that is distro-agnostic, like using command line utilities, .conf files, and ifconfig. Some Debian-specific ways to install and configure stuff was unavoidable. I was personally never wild about Debian, but learned a bit about its history, that was interesting to me.
 
Distrowatch lists quite a few distros that sprung up to replace CentOS... I never understood what's so 'Enterprise Grade' about anything under Linux, because the software functionality is so easy to replicate, for free. Available expertise/brains to solve problems - that's a support package, not some software feature that's exclusive to enterprises.
 
I never understood what's so 'Enterprise Grade' about anything under Linux, because the software functionality is so easy to replicate, for free.
It's about support and certifications. These distributions are usually supported long time by its creators, and you can get commercial support by them if you want to. A hard requirement for many companies.

Further more some high priced pieces of commercial software is certified to run only on certain platforms and nothing else. So if you really need to run this software, it really narrows down your choice of distribution if you want to get support by the creators of that stuff.
 
… If I want word-wrap, usually Pluma or Kate. …

… kate is good for some stuff …

I'd like to use Kate, but it lacks support for the character composition keystrokes to which I became accustomed after switching from Mac OS X to FreeBSD-based systems.

So I get things such as this – and this …

1630244579687.png


– wrong. I can't bear to use the app.

the editor coming up as default automatically linked for editing is ee.


Yeah, that's why we have amusements such as this
 
Yeah, that's why we have amusements such as this
Heh, quite true. Though I have also run into so many instances where a colleague has set EDITOR to a GUI editor and got confused why Git has intermittently stopped working. The main culprits are Notepad++, Visual Studio [+code] and Gedit.

Turns out if an instance of the GUI editor is already running, invocation simply sends a message to the original instance and terminates. It doesn't block execution which is what Git / SVN will wait for so instantly fails due to no commit message.
 
Reading through the wikipedia link, macOS is no longer a proper UNIX. And, it looks like a given FreeBSD machine can achieve SUS/POSIX compliance just by installing some pre-packaged ports. But I'm flabbergasted that macOS was ever considered a UNIX at all - it's about as antithetical to UNIX proper as it gets. Command line takes some getting used to, but macOS totally treats it like something you shouldn't even think of looking at, much less use.
macOS is a certified UNIX today, yes. On both Intel and Apple Silicon based computers.

The Register of UNIX® Certified Products (opengroup.org)

It's interesting to note that Solaris isn't here. The whole list is macOS, AIX, HP-UX, EulerOS, z/OS, UnixWare, and SCO OpenServer. EulerOS is a Linux distribution based on CentOS so it's possible that one can call Linux (in some contexts) a "Real Unix(tm)" now. It's interesting seeing z/OS here since it looks nothing like what we think of as "Unix," and yet here it is. But no Solaris? Oracle is really falling down in their stewardship of that venerable OS.

Anyway, I spend most of my working day buried in the command line of macOS. I came to Macs not because they're easy to use or just work, but from the other direction. I came to use Macs because they're spiffy Unix workstations with a great desktop. I don't get any sense that the command line is something you're discouraged from using.
 
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