I’m a goofy old geek that is now retired, so I can occasionally do useful things, but I can also experiment.
I remember attending a C and UNIX programming class at an AT&T facility in the early eighties when neither vi nor Emacs was readily available, nor were any of the clever editors that many of you cited. If I remember correctly, about all I had available at one point in time was the ed text editor. It worked and it was sufficient to code and edit, but 99.99% of you would complain greatly to even use it.
Choosing EITHER Emacs or Vi, or the newer Vim or any current day choice would certainly provide syntax highlighting, convenient entry, exit, copy, paste, save, move, text selection and more.
While both vi and Emacs are now antiques in many ways, they brought the majority of the current editing features into existence and I believe that we owe the great number of very easy, simple choices as well as the powerful, complex choices available today to these two once very innovative choices. I still alternate between Emacs and vim (in vi form) quite often, but I’ll also use a notepad-like tool, nano, xyz-pad or whatever happens to be available, thanking those that proceeded these for the many choices that are available today.
I didn’t use ed much - but was it worse than edlin? I went to Amiga (so had excellent editors) so I can’t go back to things like vi too easily! Things are certainly better now, though.
edlin was basically a DOS version of ed. Ed is far, far, far older. And yes, I had a system that one time was offline and ed was the only editor available (mistakes were made to lead to this), and I went with a reinstall as I was only butchering the files even WORSE when attempting to fix them. Ed was & is a horrible editor.
Did you ever encounter the magic and wonder that was Joe? It’s a wonderful editor I’ve used for almost thirty years, and offered some continuity for those of us who grew up with Wordstar and thrived on Unix/Linux derivatives through the very early 90’s! Love hearing your stories, keep them coming!
I had to use edlin a few times until I figured out some alternatives; I’ll settle for ed over edlin, but Emacs, Vi, Vim, Joe, Jove, Jedit, Nedit, Notepadqq all are “better” in one or more ways. As demonstrated, Joe is efficient and quite flexible. Nedit was fondly referred to by many as “Nirvana”. Each have their “feature set”.
What about the once “famous” TECO? Anyone old enough and crazy enough to be a TECO fan?
In case you are unfamiliar with the history of this, Richard M. Stallman, the one who came up with the idea of GNU, worked at MIT and became frustrated at the dwindling ability to freely obtain, share, and modify software. One project he explicitly started was GNU Emacs, which “modernized” and “improved upon” the interesting but unusual TECO macros I’ve mentioned.
