Naturally, vim is still acceptable.
this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2025
294 points (96.8% liked)
Programmer Humor
27507 readers
1910 users here now
Welcome to Programmer Humor!
This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!
For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.
Rules
- Keep content in english
- No advertisements
- Posts must be related to programming or programmer topics
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Ed, the greatest WYGIWYG editor of all.
What you get is what you get?
Excuse me if this was the joke.
I use ed too...
Except I have alias ed=$EDITOR and export EDITOR=nvim in my .zshrc x)
Real men use Butterfly
That's part of the bloat in emacs.
ED IS THE STANDARD TEXT EDITOR
?
You wouldn't use a "vi"itor or an "emacs"itor, you use an "ed"itor!
I would, however, use a "vi"sual editor.
I think that could be improved upon.
newsflash, ed is also visual, i can see it on my terminal rn
I use a samitor!
We do use a "vi"itor, it's called Vim/Neovim
I load the file into the memory and alter the memory bits manually.
With a magnetic needle and a steady hand ?
...anything is possible
Can't do that with SSDs.
Somehow, despite being the standard it doesn't come installed by default in any distro I've tried.
They all insist you use sed... that bloated thing!
ed and sed arre different things. One edits files in place, interactively. The other edits streams i.e.batch processing.
ed is the precursor to vi. Similar commands. It's just you can only work on one line at a time.
One edits files in place, interactively. The other edits streams i.e.batch processing.
You want sed -i -f -
ed is also the precursor of sed, and of some other dozen of commands.
Yes ed begat sed, but sed works differently. It didn't replace ed. It did a different job.
Ed loads the file into a buffer which you edit in a random access fashion and then save. Sed collects a list of commands and then streams the file line by line, executing the commands as they match lines. In your example nothing happens until you've entered the whole editing script.
sed is a stream editor. A stream editor is used to perform basic text transformations on an input stream (a file or input from a pipeline). While in some ways similar to an editor which permits scripted edits (such as ed), sed works by making only one pass over the input(s), and is consequently more efficient. But it is sed’s ability to filter text in a pipeline which particularly distinguishes it from other types of editors.
I love the way they are selling this
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.
is that vim's evil mode?
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.
and how does qed, ed, ex and sed and grep relate to nano micro and pico in comparison? 🤔
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.
It's like nano Vs the original pico
sam is the standard Plan 9 editor.
Sill och nubbe - JA TACK.
Rösta JA till proposition 5!
i concede, you are too chad for me to even be in same plane of existence.