linuxmemes

EDITOR=shred too if you’re brave or having a rough day.

Ed is kinda-sorta great-granddaddy vim.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_(software)

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vi_(text_editor)

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:

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)

Initial release: 1967

I guess TECO

which I also have not used

would kinda-sorta be the emacs analog:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TECO_(text_editor)

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:

https://www.almy.us/teco.html

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.

Intro guide © 1972: https://ia902906.us.archive.org/25/items/bitsavers_decpdp10TOandbook04tecoIntro_1457616/04_tecoIntro_text.pdf

$ ./tecoc
*Ihello, world!$$
*EWtest.txt$$
*EX$$
$ cat test.txt; echo
hello, world!
$

Clearly does work, though.

TECO is clearly the correct choice