Re: [Nmh-workers] Ditch autoconf selection of pager?

[Lyndon Nerenberg]

On 2013-01-14, at 2:32 PM, chad wrote:

> I used one of these regularly, with mh, on a Palm V with an early
> cellular modem, around 1998-2000 or so.  I really doubt there are
> people doing this any more.

I use ed every day.  When mucking around doing global replace I find the syntax 
easier on my fingers than vi's.  And really, vi's commands to do this are 
really just ed's with the :% tacked on the front (that sequence being the one I 
find painful to type).  g/foo/n is also very useful when you're trying to track 
down sequence in long and noisy config files and the like.  (Sam's structured 
REs make this even more fun!)  As always, 'the right tool for the job' applies. 
 But a lot of people are making their lives more difficult by simply dismissing 
ed out of hand.

And really, would you even consider running vi or emacs in an SSH session from 
an Android phone?  Many many times I have had to resurrect broken servers using 
just that; ed makes fixing broken config files painless.

> As a matter of practical old-fogey-ness, I wonder if people regularly
> use nmh on systems where vi isn't vim.

Yup.  In fact, I just got finished replacing vi on my Macs with the real BSD 
nvi.  All my other UNIXen already use nvi (or the vi from System V).

--lyndon