blined is a very small line-based text editor written in pure bash, intended mainly for emergency or system rescue situations, when text editors are inaccessible or broken but the shell is not. blined stands for "bash line editor".
there's also a python version, plined, for systems that somehow have a python 3 interpreter but no bash shell. even more, there's poshed, which tries to be compatible with minimally posix-compliant shells, but it's much slowerthan blined and should only be used as an absolute last resort.
small: approximately 200 lines of code
fast-ish: tries to use bash builtins whenever possible
modern: insert-based, like notepad. navigation with arrows, home, end, page-up, and page-down all works. backspace and delete both work, even at the starts/ends of lines.
written in 100% pure bash. no ncurses etc needed. tries to use terminal info to support horizontal scrolling, but can be disabled by defining the DUMBMODE environment variable to run on even more-broken systems.
# download
curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wareya/blined/refs/heads/main/blined.sh > blined.sh
# make executable (on linux/mac os)
chmod +x blined.sh
# use
./blined.sh <filename> [-s]`
ConEmu64_2024-12-04_20-37-47.mp4
or, if only python3 is available:
# download
curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wareya/blined/refs/heads/main/blined.sh > blined.sh
# make executable (on linux/mac os)
chmod +x blined.sh
# use
./blined.sh <filename> [-s]`
installation on systems with no network access or shared filesystem, but with working remote keyboard input
e.g. busted KVMs, VPS interfaces, or virtual machines, where you can "paste" (or emulate a "paste")
cat << 'EOFSIGIL' > blined.sh
insert contents of blined.sh here
insert contents of blined.sh here
insert contents of blined.sh here
EOFSIGIL
alternatively, if the above doesn't work, but awk is available on your system:
./bootstrap.awk > blined.sh
<paste the contents of blined.sh>
<hit CTRL+D>
then chmod +x blined.sh and so on
creative commons zero, public domain