When even “IDEs are complete overkill—just use vi” sounds like weakness and the entitlement of modern youth, seek out the ed fan pages!

ed isn’t quite flipping binary toggle switches to load your program, but close enough to deliver the joy of brutal minimalism along with a nostalgic waft of yesteryear.

  > ed isn’t quite flipping binary toggle switches to load your program, but close enough to deliver the joy of brutal minimalism along with a nostalgic waft of yesteryear.

ED is, well, miserable. It’s a character editor, vs a line editor, and you had the joys of paging in chunks of your file into working memory.

I, personally, find command line character editors especially difficult. I find it very hard to maintain my context and, of course, who doesn’t just love counting characters for commands.