On Mon, 5 Aug 1996, Webmaster Jim wrote:

> I'm a semi-novice; I use vi daily and ed never.  The original intent of
> this thread was to ask the release group to think about some static
> tools that might be handy in some situations.

Part of the problem is simply that there is limited space in which to
shoehorn the install tools, and ed(1) has the distinct advantage of being
small.

> If they changed
> disklabel to look for /bin/ed rather than /usr/bin/vi,

You can do that from the command line:  EDITOR=/bin/ed; export EDITOR

In fact, I do this occasionally.

> I guess I'd then
> dig up my `ed' paper man page from 1985 and go for it :-)

You might be amazed at the similarities that vi has to ed.