• palordrolap@fedia.io
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    22 hours ago

    If your system has vi or a clone, try vi -e, or, if the symlink is set up, ex. Technically that’s vi in ex mode, not ed per-se but it’s about as similar as you’re going to get without a lot of pointless bother.

      • palordrolap@fedia.io
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        20 hours ago

        Comparison time!

        ex is to ed as nano is to pico

        That is, it’s an editor that works in almost exactly the same way as the original, but it’s by somebody else.

        ex is to vi as vi is to vim, or C to C++.

        That is, the latter grew out of and improved upon the former, but you can still use them like their forerunners if you really want, which is why vi has an ex mode and why you can still use pointers in C++ if you’re sufficiently warped.

        • io@piefed.blahaj.zoneOP
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          10 hours ago

          and how does qed, ed, ex and sed and grep relate to nano micro and pico in comparison? 🤔

          • palordrolap@fedia.io
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            8 hours ago

            qed was also a line editor but pre-dated and inspired ed, so that’s pico to nano or ed to ex again, just even further back in time.

            sed and grep grew out of commands within ed (or equivalent) so I guess you could say they’re each kind of a knight’s move two to the side and once backward from the direction of ex to vi. Backwards because they’re simpler, but two to the side because they’re not interactive.

            As to what would be “backward but one to the side” in that analogy, that’d be something like a tool that asked questions about every line in a file and made changes accordingly. I don’t think there’s any such standard tool, but I can think of at least a couple of ways to write one.