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0 pointsturtleyacht2y ago0 comments

> whose preferred programming editor is ex

It's intriguing, because that implies he can work on most things in a way that "fits inside one's head."

Do you know if he extensively calls out to external tools, custom aliases, and the like?

I imagine there is some fullscreen mode where he can--temporarily--suspend ex, make use of custom sourced mappings, and the output is piped back into his editing session.

It's hard to find certain tidbits, so I'm always glad for even the smallest details.

Thank-you.

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johncowan2y ago

I'm the ex(1) troglodyte in question. I don't use custom aliases, because I have had all editing tasks hardwired into my brain for decades, ever since I dropped Teco for ed and then ex. (Ed is the standard editor, but I'm willing to trade off a little standardosity for added convenience.) If the te command had been widely available, I might have stayed with it and not used ex, but that day has passed.

I do pipe stuff through various commands more or less constantly. I most often pipeline through awk, sed, sort, uniq, cat -n, etc. I have a back-burner project to write a meta-editor that works by pipelining and maintains a whole persistent undo-redo history.

kragen2y ago

i was wondering too! thanks!

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