All this enthusiasm about newsgroups has brought me back to `tin`. Back in the early days, when I got an account at the computer centre of our university, when I learned about email and Usenet, I used tin to read the news. This was before I learned about Emacs. I guess at the time I was still using vi? Or whatever they used as the standard editor back then?
These days I like to use ed for the occasional news post and email!
Here I’m reading the news and writing a post using ed.
kensanata@cosmic:~$ tin Reading config file... 135 6a Yo! Ahooooooy! It's working. People can read and write to the campaignwiki.* newsgroups on cosmic.voyage. Cheers Alex . wq 254
“6a” starts appending at line 6 (after the headers, before the signature). “.” ends input and “wq” writes the file and quits.
It’s not so bad, actually! I even managed to write sections of the buffer to a new file, and run `fmt` on it. It’s not perfect because when I read the formatted file, the lines get appended at the end of the buffer instead of being inserted at the current line. There are still workflows to work out! 😄
If you need a book, @mwl has your back: Ed Mastery.
And of course there’s this:
golem> ed ? help ? ? ? quit ? exit ? bye ? hello? ? eat flaming death ? ^C ? ^C ? ^D ?
“Note the consistent user interface and error reportage. Ed is generous enough to flag errors, yet prudent enough not to overwhelm the novice with verbosity.” – The True Path
#Editors
(Please contact me if you want to remove your comment.)
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Here’s me doing a quick edit to the tin config file. Notice how I didn’t know how to advance the current line once I had found the comment. p prints it, n numbers it, 42p then explicitly sets and prints it. I discovered that a simple +1 would have done that, too. Nice!
alex@melanobombus ~> ed .tin/tinrc 24758 /reconnect # If ON automatically reconnect to NNTP server if the connection is broken p # If ON automatically reconnect to NNTP server if the connection is broken n 41 # If ON automatically reconnect to NNTP server if the connection is broken 42p auto_reconnect=OFF s/OFF/ON/ p auto_reconnect=ON wq 24757 alex@melanobombus ~> ed .tin/tinrc 24757 /reconnect # If ON automatically reconnect to NNTP server if the connection is broken +1 auto_reconnect=ON q
– Alex 2023-06-01 05:37 UTC