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@mattof the day ive been waiting for

@loke
to be fair, @mattof was the one to bring the new release into my sphere of awareness. One of the wonderful things about ed(1) is that new releases are rare and don't usually offer anything particularly new.

@ed1conf @mattof it doesn't really need much new stuff. You could argue that one shouldn't mess with what works. That said, multi level undo would be useful.

@loke

If I had the ability to wave a magic wand and go back in time to add one feature to ed(1), it would be the ability to filter a range through an external filter. You can write to one, you can read from one, and you can shell out to run things, but you can't

1,10 !fmt

to reformat a range. Mimicking that in non-hypothetical ed(1) requires multiple manual steps with possible odd edge cases, and writing temp data (along with possibly cleaning it up).

@mattof

@ed1conf @mattof Do you think they'd accept a patch? Would it be too big of a change?

@loke
I suspect it would be too big a change, though vi has managed to distinguish between stand-alone ! to run external commands, and ! with a range to pipe that range of lines through an external command. So it's not impossible, just highly improbable.

@mattof

@mattof @loke

vi->vim (vi improved)

ed->edm (ed improved...with Electronic Dance Music? )

@ed1conf @mattof I'm looking at the code now. It actually seems pretty easy to implement this.

Let me give it a shot this weekend.

@anthk

Yes, there's rlwrap(1) to provide history and tab-completion, but it doesn't provide a feature for piping a range of lines through an external command.

In proper Unixy fashion, you can use the -m option in rlwrap to enable control+^, allowing you to edit the current readline buffer in $EDITOR, which means you can edit your ed(1) command history in ed(1) if that's your jam

@mattof @loke

@jpmens @mattof @ed1conf it will always be, Not Unix…