line editor

line editor

[′līn ‚ed·əd·ər]

(computer science)

A text-editing system that stores a file of discrete lines of text to be printed out on the console (or displayed) and manipulated on a line-by-line basis, so that editing operations are limited and are specified for lines identified by a specific number.

McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific & Technical Terms, 6E, Copyright © 2003 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

line editor

(tool, text)

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.

This article is provided by FOLDOC - Free Online Dictionary of Computing (foldoc.org)

line editor

An outmoded text editor that allowed text to be changed one line at a time. Ed was the original Unix line editor dating back to the early 1970s, and Edlin was the editor that came with DOS PCs in the early 1980s.

The first line editors were created back in the days of teletype consoles, which accepted and printed a line of text at a time. Since there were no multi-line monitors, there was no reason to be able to go up and down the lines of text in a file, and the text was manipulated by line number. In addition, dealing with a fixed line of characters required less program logic and programming skill and took less "precious" memory than expanding and compressing a variable stream of text that crossed multiple lines. See Edlin and ed.

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