Comment by kristjansson
15 days ago
Only sort of related, but I would love to see a harness with ed as the primary file editing / reading tool. Half the bash Claude runs seems to be sed anyway, having some state persist in ed would seem to help.
What does one do when a full editor consumes too much bandwidth^H tokens? Use ed, the standard editor!
I'm not sure you understand how those terminal programs are rendered - but the amount of control code data sent to Claude would be way, way more than using command line sed.
You may want to take a look at `man ed`, `info ed`, or [0]. ed is many things, but verbose is not one of them.
In particular, it's designed for the teletype era, when (a) the user would have a trace of all the commands they'd sent and output they'd received, since it was literally printed on paper, and (b) output was literally printed on paper, and so had a direct, non-negligible cost.
This is more or less exactly the situation LLMs find themselves in. they can attend to ~all the prior output in their context window, but there's a direct cost to adding new symbols to context.
We've got a tool for exactly that setting, so it would be fun to try it!
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_(text_editor)