[hestefisk]

ed is still the standard editor.

[cperciva]

And there's even a book about it, in case anyone has trouble figuring out how to use ed: https://www.tiltedwindmillpress.com/product/ed/

[codetrotter]

Love the books by mwl. Have physical copies of several of them, and the whole bunch of the ebook versions. Currently reading one of the physical copies. The one about Ed I have in ebook format only and didn’t read it yet. Will get to that one after I finish reading the physical books that I have from him.

[VWWHFSfQ]

what do you mean by standard editor

[mrweasel]

The POSIX standard defines ed as one of the editors that must be present for a system to be standard complaint, the other being vi I believe. You can always expect ed to be available to you on a Unix system.

[zinekeller]

ed: https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799.2018edition...

vi: https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799.2018edition...

[chasil]

You can see all of the utilities this way. The ex editor is also standard.

https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/

[madars]

TIL: busybox has ed and vi but not ex. https://www.busybox.net/downloads/BusyBox.html (so ex might be nice to learn but it might be not available on common systems like OpenWRT)

[wahern]

Technically, vi and ex are part of the User Portability Utilities extension.

[doubled112]

This was initially why I learned enough of the vi keybinds to get by.

You can expect it to be there.

[znpy]

You can expect that on a unix system that has applied, paid and received the unix certification.

Most linux distros (and most BSDs afaik) are not unix certified.

MacOS is, for that matter.

[zinekeller]

POSIX != Unix (the certification)

It is true that all certified Unix systems follows POSIX, but it doesn't mean that non-certified systems are forbidden to follow POSIX. Most Linux distributions have ways to turn to 98% compliant, and BSDs have always strive to follow POSIX.

Weird fact: POSIX was actually named by RMS.

[chungy]

OpenBSD was fairly anti-POSIX in the past. I don't know if that's relaxed at all, but they very much do not chase after it.

[krylon]

But they do have ed, vi (plus ex), and mg (which is not standard but nice to have) in their base system.

[msla]

Inspur K-UX is a Linux distribution that is officially a Unix.

[fdschonborn]

OpenEuler, Huawei's version of RHEL, is also UNIX-certified.

[krylon]

I wonder what benefit the certification has these days. IIUC, it used to be a requirement for contracts from large corporations and government agencies, but these days the number of commercial Unix systems is fairly small, and RHEL is so common in those environments, I wonder if it there's still places where it's required.

[edgyquant]

They still have ed though, do they not?

[64operator]

Even DOS and VMS had ed, I'm sure other OSs too.

[mstevens]

Probably a reference to https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.html

[adl]

Here: https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.en.html