Re: [PATCH] ed with perl-compatible regular expressions

[John Cowan]

On Tue, Jul 27, 2021 at 3:07 AM Paul Jackson <pj@usa.net> wrote:

The less ed(1) changes, the happier I am.
>

I sympathize entirely with that point of view.  However, if all non-Posix
features are gated behind command-line options, particularly GNU-style
options like --pcre, then I think everyone's interests are served:

   - If you want PCRE matching, use alias ed='ed --pcre';
   - If you don't, don't use an alias;
   - To bypass the alias temporarily for performance or whatever reasons,
   type \ed to the shell.

It's unlikely you'd type such an extension by mistake, unlike (say) ed -P.

I already use alias ed=ed -p '* ' because I like prompts, but if I'm
running an ed script, I use \ed <foo.ed.