Today, I really got a nice little reward. Basically, the company I work for was getting people together to go over the renewals with our medical insurance provider, and of course, eh, I'd rather be at  my work station getting something done. So this provided me with the impetus to setup my phone as  an impromptu in-building terminal.

Problemo is, I usually use VIM. While I'm stubborn enough to give that a go on a small screen with a virtual keyboard, my phones virtual keyboard doesn't provide the *PC* keys: namely escape, control, and alt. It's also not the most convenient to use the programs methods of side stepping this. So I got to thinking for a moment, what is an editor that is light and small enough to use over a text terminal, yet powerful enough to service a programmer without a lot of special keys? --> I found the solution right in my own skills repertoire, or as some say: the default text editor! Some years back, I took the trouble to learn how to use /bin/ed out of an interest in learning how to use vi/vim better.

After a couple minutes of thinking on this, it occurred to me: ed was designed in an era when terminals were SLOW, so slow in fact, that you could probably piss off someone by trying to print to much to standard output, which could be connected to a roll of paper and a true TTY >_>.


So it seems that learning /bin/ed was well worth it, because it makes one hell of a file text editor when using your phone as a terminal :-)