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.zone 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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

[–] palordrolap@fedia.io 3 points 1 day 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.