this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2024
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Is there a precedent for a really delay-tolerant command line interface? (A bit off-topic) (lemmy.sdf.org)
submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I've been playing with an idea that would involve running a machine over a delay-tolerant mesh network. The thing is, each packet is precious and needs to be pretty much self contained in that situation, while modern systems assume SSH-like continuous interaction with the user.

Has anyone heard of anything pre-existing that would work here? I figured if anyone would know about situations where each character is expensive, it would be you folks.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago (3 children)

The 'ed' editor was designed for high latency networks. I would pull on that thread. That is, in your shoes, I would read up on 'ed' and related tools.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Delightful!

"Of course, on the system I administrate, vi is symlinked to ed. Emacs has been replaced by a shell script which 1) Generates a syslog message at level LOG_EMERG; 2) reduces the user's disk quota by 100K; and 3) RUNS ED!!!!!!"

Gave me a giggle. That 100k loss has got to hurt for a user who still tries to run 'vi' on a classic system, I imagine.

Edit:

Another gem:

"Ed is generous enough to flag errors, yet prudent enough not to overwhelm the novice with verbosity."

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

I would pull on that thread. That is, in your shoes

Directions unclear; shoelaces tangled

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Ed is great (in this context). I think there's been posts about it on here before. It's just a text editor, though.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

Yeah. I've had mentors regail me of other tools they used alongside 'Ed', but I wasn't listening very attentively. Hopefully that's something that can be dug out of the history of the Internet.

I would definitely choose the old reliable stuff over something new and fancy, if I had this use case.