So before I learn how to program anything I'm looking for a text editor. Piping text into files isn't that fun if then you gotta modify it. At first I believed vi would be the best fit since it's what half of *nix users use & the shortcuts apparently made editting files a breeze. I mean, to begin with, you use it on a terminal & it doesn't everwhelm you with bloat like syntax highlighting & multiple cursors.

Eventually I discover 9front & got fond of it. The OS being distributed across the network & actually everything* is a file? How cool is that! So I delved more into it &, to my surprise, vi is actually some sort of MIPS emulator or...smth? I just wanna edit files!

So I soon find out about ed & it felt like a gift given by Science. You open a file with ed & nothing appears; all you get is a cursor. If you wanna see everything, type ",p". If you wanna change "/usr/local/" to "/user/local/smth/" on line 249, type "249s:l/:l/smth:p" (or "249s/\/usr\/local\//\/usr\/local\/smth\//p" if you're massochist). Wanna move line 53 to after line 267? Just type "53m267". You're telling me I can edit text with commands in an interactive, efficient & simple way? This is even better than MS notepad!

Ever since I constantly found myself using ed for editing files, even by accident in class when we're supposed to be using nano (yuck). It just feels good to not invade your whole terminal & move the cursor with your keys just to edit a few lines. Ed is fully featured & it doesn't fall in the trap of reintroducing concepts already present in the OS (i.e tabs, file manager, git integration...). In fact, if you wanna execute a command, you don't need to close your ed session or open a new terminal! Just precede your command with ! as in "!git clone git://git.whatev thing".

Ed is so good, considering its simplicity, it doesn't oherwhelm the user with error messages every time they wrongly execute a command. It prints a ? & lets the user analise the command by themself, helped by the man page (or info if you're using GNU's ed) if needed. You can learn all commands in an afternoon, unlike vi where you'll be learning shortcuts & tricks until you start deleting childhood memories to make room for the one that prints the last text you wrote.

Now I can see why people don't wanna use ed. It's very different from modern text editors, it's not as perfect as I'd like (since in 9front I can't freely modify text of an "a" command as I can on the terminal) & some Linux distros went as far as to commit murder (by removing ed from the base install). But still I like it better than vi since it does all I want a CLI text editor to do...but now we have graphics & Plan 9 comes with 2 more text editors: sam & acme (popular among Plan 9 from User Space users).

Sam is a graphical evolution of ed that lets you use ed's commands while also using your mouse which, in spite of some evangelicals, I appreciate. & acme is an IDE with a couple more features to make programming less painful, being possible to set it as your window manager in 9front (all without having syntax highlighting!).

I haven't given them a fair try yet since rn I'm focused on learning about anarchism & stuff, but once I get on them I'll report back. Afterall, I like using an ed*itor, not a viitor or an EMACSitor, but what about a samitor?