I Love ED on CP/M

A demonstration of ED, the standard editor for CP/M, being used properly.

00:00 Introduction
00:33 File size
01:02 Opening a file
03:20 Loading source file into memory buffer
04:14 Paging and moving through file
05:32 Moving Character Pointer (CP)
07:19 Insert text
09:06 Finding text
10:00 Macro to find text
11:04 Substituting text using a macro
12:47 Juxtapose command
13:48 Copy and pasting
17:08 Handling big files
21:29 Splitting and joining lines
22:47 Please subscribe and leave comments below

[TechTinkering]

The search and replace macro could also be written: MFCPM^Z0TT6Z-3DICP/M^Z This makes used of the inline insert version of the 'I' command.

[mastrake]

I found this in my search for information on this ancient operating system. It's a great video with lots of useful examples of the ED commands.

[Silvertone]

A lot to remember which is why I’m putting together a cheat sheet based on your excellent video.

[nathanaelculver]

I have fond memories of learning ED from the actual DR manual. You’d never find gems like this in a Microsoft Word user’s manual. It’s enough to reduce a Gen-Xer to tears.

_...the following action [is] applied n times to the memory buffer: search from the current CP for the next occurrence of the string c1c2...ck. If found, insert the string d1, d2..., dm, and move CP to follow dm. Then delete all characters following CP up to (but not including) the string e1, e2..., eq, leaving CP directly after dm._

[edgeeffect]

At college we used WordStar in non-document mode for source code... just to avoid ED. ;)
Gotta look at some of your other CP/M videos.... they'll take me back to my youth.

[xav]

This was a useful tutorial to help me use the Z80-MBC2 homebrew computer with CPM 3 that has only the ED editor.

[first-thoughtgiver-of-will]

Thank you for sharing this otherwise scarce information. Great video.

[randyjackson]

Thanks for this, just the right information i was looking for

[CarlesOriol]

I like your video. I watched it because I hated ED, and after viewing it, I hate ED even more. Thanks I've learned a lot

[simpleprogrammingcodes]

Great video. I also learned some commands of ED by using CCP/M-86. I really like it. I don't understand why there is no clone for DOS and Linux... Perhaps it's possible to disassemble it and convert it to C or something...

[qfytidw]

So you're reading in the first part of a file, inserting characters, and then saving. How does that work? It seems like you'd need to have the whole file in memory to be able to do insertions. I remember I had a Windows file editor that had a 'large file' mode where it would default to binary and overwrite mode. If you switched to insert it would be forced to load the whole file. If it was bigger than available memory Windows would start to swap badly.

[tomjscott]

Wow, I watched this in the hopes that I was wrong about this editor and maybe I could actually be productive with it. Instead, I now have confirmation on just how ridiculously bad this editor is.

[BrunoRegno]

And people blast me for loving and using VI instead of modern IDEs... 😂