Re: What does “grep” stand for?

[Chris Angelico]

On Thu, Nov 5, 2015 at 6:32 PM, Christian Gollwitzer <auriocus at gmx.de> wrote:
> The point I'm so amused is, that MS has not felt the need to ship a real
> editor, and also cut back on most of the other tools that make computing,
> even on commandlines, a pleasant experience. Readline? Tab-Completion? I
> read a magazine called "DOS", where they scripted the hell out of
> .BAT-files. When they first showed an article about bash programming, I was
> really jealous that the people on these strange, exotic OSes had such a
> complete programming language at their disposal. Now I can't imagine giving
> it back ever.

I don't remember whether DOS 3.x had it, but we upgraded to MS-DOS 5.0
fairly early in my life, and that's most of what I remember. In that
version, we had a thing called DOSKey, which gave you command history
and some editing keys (not nearly as rich as readline, of course, but
good enough for a lot of work); tab completion was an astonishing new
feature when I first met a bash-derived shell. And yes, astonishing.
I'd thought that GUIs had this advantage over command lines in that
long file names (especially with spaces and such) didn't cost you
anything, since you simply click to select; I somewhat resented them
for it. And then, wow, tab completion! You type the beginning of the
name and it fills in the rest!

>> Fast forward a decade or two, and I'm working on a MUD server for a
>> friend. It incorporates an editor that can be used on a dumb telnet
>> connection - and it's line based again. So there's clearly some value
>> here :) Visual editors get the lion's share of actual editing work,
>> but in special circumstances, it is nice to have a quick little
>> ed-like program around.
>
> In this case I'd copy the file to the local machine and sync it using rsync
> or git. It's almost as terse in terms of bandwidth as the manual editing
> commands, but a lot more comfortable.

That server didn't allow rsync/git; I think they didn't use git, and
rsync probably would have meant setting up duplicate Unix accounts for
everyone that paralleled the permissions they had on the MUD itself.
On my own server, I don't have any fine-grained permissions (either
you're allowed to edit files, or you're not), so I have a much simpler
system: you type "edit some_file_name" and it sends you the contents
of the file in a way that makes the client pop up an editor. Hit Save
in the editor, and it sends the file back. Pretty easy. But still,
there _are_ good uses for a line-based editor, even if they are rare.

ChrisA