I’m swamped doing math for the networking book kickstarter, trying to compensate for the recent political stupidity that’s kicking small business when it’s down, so here’s a tidbit from an older work.
Let me be very clear here: ed(1) is the standard Unix text editor.
Dennis Ritchie, co-creator of Unix, declared it so. Who are you to argue with someone who can write a complete operating system without using a glass teletype?1
Many younger sysadmins naively hoist their pennants to defend overblown, overwrought, overdesigned text editors like ex, vi, or even the impossibly bloated nvi. A few are so lost as to devote themselves to turgid editors meant for mere users, such as vim and Emacs. This way lies not only appalling sysadmin skills, but an absence of moral fiber. As a sysadmin, you must have enough brain power to remember what you typed, to hold your own context in your head, and to truly commune with the machine on a deep and personal level.
1 You know, a glass teletype. That toy that kids keep calling a “monitor,” even though we all know monitors are reference speakers used in audio production.
Why read this today? Because this crossed my feed…
