I wonder if one could hide the line numbers in Edlin, e.g. via a batch file.
I've always found line editors interesting. For many tasks, e.g. writing texts, they create a different kind of "flow" because you cannot see the entire composition on one screen. You're composing more "in your head" and focus visual attention to smaller fragments of your text.
However, as for Edlin, those line numbers are a minor visual disturbance (I understand that the command language relies on them, though). In the Unix-land (or rather, Plan 9), Rob Pike's sam editor [1] is imo excellent in the CLI mode -- even though it is intended to use with the GUI and a 3-button mouse. But you can also just not load the GUI with a command line switch (sam -d).
sam has a truly great command language [2]; according to some, especially good for editing multiple files at a time. I like its recursive nature, and I have done many complex replacements in large files that seemed to be much harder to write with something like sed (considering my modest skills of course :).
The central paradigm is that as opposed to ed, sam is not line-oriented. In sam, everything is a sting. This makes multi-line substitutions simpler (and recursively complex if you want! :). You can do a lot of interesting things with it. Piping stuff to/from the OS terminal (e.g. fmt) works great as well.
I'm just a hobbyist, but I've been thinking about trying to port sam's command line interface (not the GUI) for DOS as well. It is currently Unix or Plan9 only.
I suppose a standard quote from Ken Thompson suits here as well. What he said, comparing visual editors to something like ed:
"Yeah, I've seen [visual] editors like that, but I don't feel a need for them. I don't want to see the state of the file when I'm editing." [3]
Great quote for feeling nostalgic, at least, hehe. However, I do think he might be onto something here in terms of how the human brain and cognition works. Maybe even in our times of huge screens, those complex visual word processors should not always be taken for granted. I've felt that "fear of blank screen" a lot while writing stuff with a word processor. It is almost never the case on a line editor where you simply cannot visualize the whole text -- or the fact that you have not yet written even a single paragraph :).
So it's always interesting to (try to :) think about whether and how much cognitive overload those screenfuls of visual information might cause at times.
All that said, it is also great fun to see that FreeDOS Edlin was actually updated to version 2.22 only this spring, in 2023. [4] That is 43 years after the first version was realeased. DOS ain't dead. :)
I've always found line editors interesting. For many tasks, e.g. writing texts, they create a different kind of "flow" because you cannot see the entire composition on one screen. You're composing more "in your head" and focus visual attention to smaller fragments of your text.
However, as for Edlin, those line numbers are a minor visual disturbance (I understand that the command language relies on them, though). In the Unix-land (or rather, Plan 9), Rob Pike's sam editor [1] is imo excellent in the CLI mode -- even though it is intended to use with the GUI and a 3-button mouse. But you can also just not load the GUI with a command line switch (sam -d).
sam has a truly great command language [2]; according to some, especially good for editing multiple files at a time. I like its recursive nature, and I have done many complex replacements in large files that seemed to be much harder to write with something like sed (considering my modest skills of course :).
The central paradigm is that as opposed to ed, sam is not line-oriented. In sam, everything is a sting. This makes multi-line substitutions simpler (and recursively complex if you want! :). You can do a lot of interesting things with it. Piping stuff to/from the OS terminal (e.g. fmt) works great as well.
I'm just a hobbyist, but I've been thinking about trying to port sam's command line interface (not the GUI) for DOS as well. It is currently Unix or Plan9 only.
I suppose a standard quote from Ken Thompson suits here as well. What he said, comparing visual editors to something like ed:
"Yeah, I've seen [visual] editors like that, but I don't feel a need for them. I don't want to see the state of the file when I'm editing." [3]
Great quote for feeling nostalgic, at least, hehe. However, I do think he might be onto something here in terms of how the human brain and cognition works. Maybe even in our times of huge screens, those complex visual word processors should not always be taken for granted. I've felt that "fear of blank screen" a lot while writing stuff with a word processor. It is almost never the case on a line editor where you simply cannot visualize the whole text -- or the fact that you have not yet written even a single paragraph :).
So it's always interesting to (try to :) think about whether and how much cognitive overload those screenfuls of visual information might cause at times.
All that said, it is also great fun to see that FreeDOS Edlin was actually updated to version 2.22 only this spring, in 2023. [4] That is 43 years after the first version was realeased. DOS ain't dead. :)
1: http://sam.cat-v.org/
2: http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/sam_lang_tutorial/sam_tut.pdf
3: http://web.archive.org/web/20080103071208/http://www.dcs.qmu.../ (as summarized by Peter Salus in "A Quarter Century of UNIX" (Addison-Wesley, 1994)
4: https://freedos-edlin.sourceforge.io