ed, the “standard editor” (according to its man page) and the predecessor of vi (the “visual editor”), is a terminal editor that doesn’t automatically display any of the text you’re working on; you have to use the p (“print”) command to display the lines your wish to see.
If you have a Linux or Mac handy, you can trying it out! It’s…kinda wild. If you know some Vim commands that start with :, there’s a good chance they’ll work in ed, except you don’t type : itself (effectively you’re always in “command mode”).
There’s also a novelty Twitter account, @ed1conf, that tweets about ed.
Some coworkers told me a story about a previous job candidate who said his preferred editor was ed. They thought it would be really interesting to see someone actually use it. But during the actual interview, when he opened ed, he didn’t recognize or understand it; he was actually accustomed to a graphical editor that he thought was called ed because he apparently did all his work on a system where someone had symlinked or aliased ed to a modern tool.
Knew a programmer that was near blind who only used magnifier on maximum zoom with his IDE. One of the best programmers I met, but his screen looked very much like that. Don’t know how he did it.
Well put, however I find code formatting itself has a shape, texture and smell. How the programmer weaves the patterns of formatting tells a lot about his mind and style.
Albino? There was an albino in my IT and the poor dude would literally be like 4 inches from the screen at all times. I guess that must be pretty close to his experience, yeah.
Yeah, I worked with an albino like that who used a handheld magnifying glass. It actually inspired me to write a magnifier application for windows (which didn’t have one at the time, this was in 2006). That then led me to write little windows apps every day for a month, which got a lot of attention.
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