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    Tech/Simple Beauty, (circumlunar), 11/13/2018
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There has been a little bit of a discussion on schat over at
circumlunar.space on line editors. Specifically, there was a
brief chat about 'ed' and 'Edim' (the latter written by C.S.
user krixano.) I've never used a line editor, other than a
few odd pokes here and there, and maybe a BASIC project or
two over the years (that is, a line editor written in BASIC,
not the BASIC editor itself.) Since these kinds of editors
are an important part of computing history, I figure it is
high time I give it a go.

This post, of course, is being written in 'ed' - a favorite
editor of user yargo over at C.S. (and probably many others
as well.) I was tickled to note that the man page for ed
was actually a stub pointing the reader to the info page. I
was happy to see that the info page was well constructed,
and easy to navigate. (I should add, that I'm editing this in ed on
my local system, and will upload it later to my phlog...)

Adding text in is easy enough. Ed is bare-bones (by today's
standards, of course) but it is certainly not featureless.
I'm surprised how easy it is to enter text. The process is clean
enough that if you think about what you're going to say, and you
aren't too worried about your document, you can hammer something
out without really having to learn much more than the 'a' command.
In the case of this post, I purposefully created some problems
for myself that I would have to go through and fix.

On the edim side of things, life is a bit prettier than on
the ed side. There is a useful command prompt, with real
information that helps you edit. There are colors, which
make things more readable (and offend many, I think, but
I love them.) There is a help system built-in. If I had to
say just one thing about edim, I'd say that it makes the
line editor more accessible.

Right here I've started editing my 'ed' file in edim. I jumped
around a bit in the file, which was a complete post, and am now
inserting this paragraph. The process wasn't hard, but I did need
to use the help, to make sure I understand how it worked compared
to the 'ed' that I was just using. I really enjoy how the line
numbers are a different color (easy to read!) and how the command
line shows you helpful info. I haven't learned all the tricks in
here yet (or in ed) but it does get the job done.

I said at the beginning that I had only poked at line editors here
and there, but it would be more accurate to say that I poked at
them once upon a time, many years ago, and wasn't happy with the
experience. I'm older now, and a bit more patient. I don't mind
reading the manual. I don't mind if I don't have all the answers
right away. And I don't mind learning. All of those things has meant
that this particular round with line editors has been much more
enjoyable. While I can't see myself switching to them like some
of the more hardcore users out there, I am pleased to think that if
the need arose, I might be able to get around OK with just 'ed.'

The next step is to see if I can find some help for the command set
that my CP/M ED.COM uses...