The question of moving vi to /bin

[Manish Jain]

Ruben de Groot wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 25, 2009 at 01:36:31AM -0400, John L. Templer typed:
>> ed is an interactive program, and it has always been considered as such,
>> at least since BSD 4.2.  Way back then there were three main editors,
>> ex, vi, and ed.  If you had a nice video terminal then you used vi.  But
>> if you were stuck using a hard copy terminal like a Decwriter, then you
>> used ex.  And ed was the simplified (dumbed down) editor for newbies.
>>
>> ed is an interactive program because the user "interacts" with it.  You
>> give it command, it does something, you give it some more commands, it
>> does more stuff, etc.  Interactive does not mean screen based.
> 
> ed can be used very well non-interactively.
> e.g. a script made by diff -e can be piped to it.
> 
> Ruben
> 
> 

What I meant was the primary usage. Of course, there are many tools (ed 
included) which will allow non-interactive usage, and still others which 
  can be tweaked or forced into that behaviour. The point about ed is 
that it does not live up to the needs of its primary mode.

Somebody mentioned something about getting multi-line replacement 
functionality from ed that is not possible with sed. If only the 
gentleman would go through the documentation for a recent version of 
sed, he could save himself from a lot of further pain. This following 
link was posted a few days earlier from freebsd-questions itself :

http://www.grymoire.com/Unix/Sed.html

There probably isn't much to compare between freebsd and cygwin, but 
cygwin has dropped ed (and afaik only ed) from its base distribution not 
for nothing. Maybe they were concerned about the bloat factor, and for 
good reason in ed's case.

-- 
Regards
Manish Jain
invalid.pointer at gmail.com
+91-96500-10329

Laast year I kudn't spell Software Engineer. Now I are won.