Do you use ed?

DavidMcCann · 06-03-2010, 12:46 PM

I'd never heard of ed until I read this post. It takes me back nearly 30 years to editing batch files with edlin, and I really don't want to go there.

I can beat 44K: 33K for Spy, an old QL editor that I still use occasionally. Its strip option is great for removing CRs for Microsoft files, though I dare say there's a command-line tool for that that I don't know.

MBybee · 06-04-2010, 01:42 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by CoderMan

One nice thing about it is that it is small, but still workable. On my system, the binary is 44K, and that is with -O2 optimization. Dependencies are pretty light also:

Code:

$ ldd /bin/ed
	linux-vdso.so.1 =>  (0x00007fff24722000)
	libc.so.6 => /lib/libc.so.6 (0x00007f2869326000)
	/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00007f286967f000)

Sure, but e3 is smaller, very easy to use, and is done in assembler IIRC.

Code:

$ ls -lh /usr/bin/e3
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 13K 2008-05-04 23:39 /usr/bin/e3

I finally found a Linux implementation of edt(VMS edit/tpu) so I'm checking that out - but it's still larger than this.

nigelc · 06-04-2010, 04:05 AM

They even had it on DEC. not sure what they called it.

sica07 · 06-04-2010, 04:42 AM

Vim and mc's editor.

CoderMan · 06-04-2010, 02:42 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by MBybee

Sure, but e3 is smaller, very easy to use, and is done in assembler IIRC.

Code:

$ ls -lh /usr/bin/e3
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 13K 2008-05-04 23:39 /usr/bin/e3

I finally found a Linux implementation of edt(VMS edit/tpu) so I'm checking that out - but it's still larger than this.

Hey, that is pretty cool. I installed e3 with Gentoo's Portage and it used the YASM assembler. Came out to about 17K on my system.

As I mentioned before, I compiled ed with -O2, so it would probably be smaller if I compiled for size instead of performance. But e3 would still be smaller, no doubt.

Of course, the downside of an editor coded in assembly is the lack of portability, which is certain to be an issue on the systems where you really need a small editor -- embedded systems.

MBybee · 06-04-2010, 11:48 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by CoderMan

Of course, the downside of an editor coded in assembly is the lack of portability, which is certain to be an issue on the systems where you really need a small editor -- embedded systems.

True enough, though you changed criteria

Portability is actually why I ended up switching from edt/edit/tpu to vi and Vim. I found that once I got out of the VMS world nothing else used that editor, but vi was on nearly everything (except DOS - and edit on DOS was *awful*)