From owner-freebsd-questions Wed May 8 6:26: 9 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.eskimo.com (mx1.eskimo.com [204.122.16.48]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0E13D37B405 for ; Wed, 8 May 2002 06:26:06 -0700 (PDT) Received: from eskimo.com (ripper@eskimo.com [204.122.16.13]) by mx1.eskimo.com (8.9.1a/8.8.8) with ESMTP id GAA11969 for ; Wed, 8 May 2002 06:26:04 -0700 Received: (from ripper@localhost) by eskimo.com (8.9.1a/8.9.1) id GAA02899; Wed, 8 May 2002 06:26:04 -0700 (PDT) Date: Wed, 8 May 2002 06:26:04 -0700 (PDT) Message-Id: <200205081326.GAA02899@eskimo.com> From: Ross Lippert To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: an editor in /bin Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG One of the shocks I had when booting in single-user mode to fix something was the lack of an editor in /bin other than ed. I guess my questions are: 1) is there a better editor in /bin than ed? 2) (if yes) shouldn't there be a better editor in /bin than ed? FreeBSD was a major impetus for me to learn vi (pretty much bc emacs is a port). I don't see myself learning something more spartan than vi, but maybe there is some value someone can point out using ed. 3) (if yes) should that editor be vi or ee? One piece of good user-friendliness which has happened recently in freebsd is the use of ee as the default editor in sysinstall instead of vi. This has been very helpful for newbies. I can attest to sitting over the shoulder of one newbie who has gone on to learn vi, but would have freaked out if her first taste of it was during the install. She got through ee just fine. I'd really like to see ee used as the default editor in vipw as well, for the sake of consistency (eepw, anyone?). On the other hand, vi needs to be learned for certain tasks like vipw and visudo (assuming ee versions of these gadgets can't easily be made), so vi is here to stay, and perhaps anyone who can't use vi has no business booting freeBSD into single-user mode. space considerations: vi is 304k, ee is 54k, ed is 138k -r To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message