Date:        Thu, 25 Apr 2002 08:41:17 -0400 (EDT)
    From:        "Thomas Mueller" <tmueller@bluegrass.net>
    Message-ID:  <200204251241.g3PCfDRW049239@w3.bluegrass.net>

  | ed is for people who have a second computer where they can have the man page
  | for ed showing,

For people who are ever going to use ed, learning the whole thing, front
to back, should take a half an hour.   It is very simple, and very consistent.
The only part that should give anyone trouble is understanding regular
expressions, but they're by no means peculiar to ed (if you can manage
them in grep, they're the same...)   The other thing which might take
some time is trying to figure out how to do something that ed can't
easily do.   Typically in that situation it is simpler to just accept that
it can't be done (you can always just re-type...) rather than attempting
to work out how what ed can do might be bent into achieving what you want.

  | I actually copied files to be edited to floppy disk in netbsd directory for
  | editing using elvis 2.1.4 under Linux or DOS, which meant an extra reboot.

If the editing were more than trivial, that might sometimes be the best way
if you can't get a more featureful editor working.

Anecdote:   in the early days, I was sceptical of vi - I was used to and
used an enhanced version of em, and thought that was just fine.  Then Bill
Joy and I were doing some programming together, and he was managing to make
changes at about twice the rate I was ... he was using vi, and I wasn't.
I converted...

  | Tim Baldwin of IBM wrote a Tiny Editor for DOS and 16-bit OS/2, executable is
  | slightly < 10000 bytes for DOS, slightly more for OS/2, and is much more
  | user-friendly than ed.

ed isn't "user friendly" for beginners, and isn't at all like any kind of
editor most people use these days - but it is actually very powerful for
quite a small editor.   Don't compare it against your average "tiny editor"
that someone created - ed isn't that.   It was the editor used to write
all the code for unix for a long time - that couldn't be done if ed wasn't
relatively powerful.

kre