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

[Shawn Wagner]

On Mon, Jul 26, 2021 at 7:31 AM Antonio Diaz Diaz <antonio@gnu.org> wrote:
>...
> If I understand the situation correctly, ed is mostly of historical
> interest. Therefore my two priorities are keeping it bug-free and minimizing
> the maintenance effort. I'm afraid this patch goes against these two goals.
>
> If there were a consensus among ed users that this feature is useful, I
> would happily look into this, but I have not yet seen enough demand for such
> a radical change.
>

That's unfortunate. I wouldn't call ed just of historical influence -
while it's lacking as an interactive editor in most circumstances, I
find it very useful in shell scripts to automate the editing of files
- it works much better than the ubiquitous sed -i for many tasks. I'm
mostly trying to fix one annoyance I've found - simple to use
case-insensitive regular expressions. Having more powerful REs
available as an option and parity with the flavors of RE accepted by
its stepchild grep are just added bonuses. If you don't want to use
this one, what about the earlier hackjob of a patch I sent that just
checks to see if the RE starts with (?i) and calls regcomp() with the
appropriate flag if so? Case-insensitive BREs and EREs are better than
nothing. and it's a smaller and less invasive patch if that's your
concern..