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It’s funny but I only just had this thought: in the dark ages of text editing we would use ed to write commands that edited line by line, and then another command to show the changes.

What a chore! Enter vi where you can see a window into large parts of the file while editing it at the same time. It was a quantum leap in productivity for sure especially because I could work form a terminal (as opposed to jumping to a different system more geared towards word processing etc.)

But for SQLite databases I am somehow still fooled into thinking I am content, when in a terminal, to issue INSERT/UPDATE commands to make changes and SELECT commands to see those changes is adequate.

If this is the equivalent of ed…

  > sqlite3 my.db
  UPDATE table …
  SELECT …
…and if this post is linking to a GUI equivalent of Microsoft Word 6.0, then is there instead a vi equivalent for editing database tables, and what is it?


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