ed

n.

“ed is the standard text editor.” Line taken from the original Unix manual page on ed, an ancient line-oriented editor that is by now used only by a few Real Programmers, and even then only for batch operations. The original line is sometimes uttered near the beginning of an emacs vs. vi holy war on Usenet, with the (vain) hope to quench the discussion before it really takes off. Often followed by a standard text describing the many virtues of ed (such as the small memory footprint on a Timex Sinclair, and the consistent (because nearly non-existent) user interface).