Re: Most used words in current buffer

[Bob Proulx]

Udyant Wig wrote:
> Bob Proulx wrote:
> > Also remember that at the time knowledge and daily use of ed (and qed,
> 
> That is true.  I expect that learning the three of ed, sed, and grep
> will be mutually reinforcing; the functionality in ed forms the basis of
> those in sed and grep.

Perhaps the other facet of this is regular expressions.  When I was in
my entry level university class the first two weeks solid were spent
on learning to use the computer, use the editor, work with files, and
using regular expressions.  That last, regular expressions, seems to
be less emphasized today.  It isn't taught at all at the local
university.  AFAICT students here pick it up only in passing if at
all.  They are missing out on a very powerful feature.

> One cannot however expect ed to be available by default on modern Unix
> systems.  E.g., it is not there by default on Debian.

I have two stories that I find funny about ed.  This one happened in
the last week.  A friend at a meetup had a problem with his Ubuntu
laptop.  His GUI was broken and needed a small file fix.  This person
uses the GUI for everything and had no terminal editors installed, as
far as I could tell.  Not vi, vim, nor emacs nor other.  Of course
this person's normal GUI editors were unavailable without X running.
But strangely 'ed' *was* installed.  I don't use Ubuntu but I guess it
got installed by default there.  Or something pulled it in.  I have no
idea.

I think you can already tell where this is going.  I used ed to edit
and fix things.  Being able to use it appeared like magic to this
person who couldn't imagine you could edit something without a mouse.

This happened in just this last week!  Having ed there made the task
easy.

And I'll save the other funny story about ed for another time. :-)

Bob