line editor

line editor

An outmoded editing program that allows text to be created and changed one line at a time. Edlin was a line editor included with earlier versions of DOS, and ed was the original Unix line editor.

Line editors were the first text editing programs ever written, because they were the easiest to program. Dealing with a fixed line of characters requires less program logic than dealing with an infinite stream of text that can be expanded and deleted.

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(tool, text)

line editor - An early kind of text editor suited to use on a teletype. The user enters editing commands which apply to the current line or some given range of lines. These include moving forward and backward through the buffer, inserting and deleting lines, substituting a string for a pattern match, and printing lines. Visual feedback is restricted to explicitly requesting the display of one or more lines, in contrast to a screen editor. ed is Unix's line editor.