ed (pronounced as distinct letters, /ˌiːˈdiː/)[1] is a line editor for Unix and Unix-like operating systems. It was one of the first parts of the Unix operating system that was developed, in August 1969.
Dennis M. Ritchie produced what Doug McIlroy later described as the “definitive” ed,[5] and aspects of ed went on to influence ex, which in turn spawned vi.
Vim (“Vi IMproved”) has many additional features compared to vi, including (scriptable) syntax highlighting, mouse support, graphical versions, visual mode, many new editing commands and a large amount of extension in the area of ex commands.
I’ve never used qed, but it sounds like that might be considered even one step back:
TECO (/ˈtiːkoʊ/[1]), short for Text Editor & Corrector, [2] [3][4] is both a character-oriented text editor and a programming language,[5][6] that was developed in 1962 for use on Digital Equipment Corporation computers, and has since become available on PCs and Unix. Dan Murphy developed TECO while a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
It was subsequently modified by many other people[7] and is a direct ancestor of Emacs, which was originally implemented in TECO macros.
EDIT: Actually…hmm. Now that I think of it, I might have briefly used TECO on a DEC VAX/VMS cluster. IIRC, I mostly used EVE, though.
EDIT2: Hmm. Apparently someone has ported TECO to Linux:
TECO, that grand old text editor your father used when he was young, is still available! It is powerful and compact precursor to EMACS and has a completely nongraphical user interface. This is based on Pete Siemsen’s TECOC implementation, and comes with a copy of the original DECUS TECO documentation.
Do I need a paper tape punch and reader to use TECO?
No. Modern TECOs will also edit text files.
Is TECO fast?
Yes, it’s probably the fastest editor available
While I’m maintaining the files as I had worked on them and downloads here, Blake McBride has taken the source code, added the video/scope mode, fixed bugs and improved the speed (not that it is slow!), documented the changes and has it available in GitHub. Go here for his work https://github.com/blakemcbride/TECOC
tries building it
Hah. It takes under a third of a second to compile on my system:
$ git clone https://github.com/blakemcbride/TECOC.git
$ cd TECOC/src
$ time make -j32 -f makefile.linux >/dev/null 2>&1
real 0m0.296s
user 0m2.341s
sys 0m0.874s
$
Hmm. Yeah, I don’t remember how to use this at all, if I did use it. Looks like the command syntax is a little like ed’s, but you whack Escape twice to execute commands. Each press of Escape displays a dollar sign.
Ed is kinda-sorta great-granddaddy vim.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_(software)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vi_(text_editor)
I’ve never used qed, but it sounds like that might be considered even one step back:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_(software)
Many features of ed came from the qed text editor developed at Thompson’s alma mater University of California, Berkeley.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QED_(text_editor)
I guess TECO — which I also have not used — would kinda-sorta be the emacs analog:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TECO_(text_editor)
EDIT: Actually…hmm. Now that I think of it, I might have briefly used TECO on a DEC VAX/VMS cluster. IIRC, I mostly used EVE, though.
EDIT2: Hmm. Apparently someone has ported TECO to Linux:
https://www.almy.us/teco.html
tries building it
Hah. It takes under a third of a second to compile on my system:
Hmm. Yeah, I don’t remember how to use this at all, if I did use it. Looks like the command syntax is a little like ed’s, but you whack Escape twice to execute commands. Each press of Escape displays a dollar sign.
Intro guide © 1972: https://ia902906.us.archive.org/25/items/bitsavers_decpdp10TOandbook04tecoIntro_1457616/04_tecoIntro_text.pdf
Clearly does work, though.
Vim is bloatware atop Ed making it insanely memory hungry and nearly unusable.
(Send from an IBM PC with 256k memory running LFS)
LFS is unlikely to run on such a machine. BSD or Xenix are appropriate operating systems.