editors in rescue mode

[Smoot Carl-Mitchell]

On Tue, 2008-08-05 at 08:00 +0200, Florian Diesch wrote:
> Smoot Carl-Mitchell <smoot at tic.com> wrote:
> 
> > On Sun, 2008-08-03 at 17:26 -0700, Robert Holtzman wrote:
> >
> >> Yes. I didn't try nano, didn't think of it.
> >
> > Or to avoid dependence on any terminal emulator use "ed". I used to have
> > to do this on an old VAX-11-780 in single user mode where the console
> > was literally a hardcopy teletype!
> 
> >From /usr/share/emacs/*/etc/JOKES:

LOL!  Thanks for that.

As an historical note, vi is a visual extension of ed. Whenever you type
a ":" in vi, it drops you to what is essentially the ex editor command
line.  ex is an extension of ed. Mark Horton (the inventor of vi) did
this deliberately, so all the search and regular expression power of ed
was available in vi. Mark also invented termcap which is similar to
terminfo so vi would work on the wide variety of character cell
terminals available at the time. This made vi the editor of choice for
most Unix sysadmins, since it was widely available across all Unix
variants and would work on all CRT terminals.
-- 
Smoot Carl-Mitchell
System/Network Architect
smoot at tic.com
+1 480 922 7313
cell: +1 602 421 9005