Here’s the Deal

ed vs Kate

14 10

99 16

When comparing ed vs Kate, the Slant community recommends Kate for most people. In the question“What are the best programming text editors?” Kate is ranked 8th while ed is ranked 61st. The most important reason people chose Kate is:

Kate supports syntax highlighting for over 180 languages, from Assembler to Zsh

Specs

Collaborative editingNo

PlatformsWindows; OSX; *nix

Supported remote file editing protocolsNone

Column selectionNo

ScriptableYes

Collaborative editingNo

PlatformsWindows; OSX; *nix

Supported remote file editing protocolsFTP; HTTP; SSH; WebDAV

BidiYes

LicenseGPL

RTLYes

Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking

Common Questions

What are the best programming text editors?

What are the best Linux text editors?

Pros

Pro
ed is the standard text editor

As the standard text editor, ed is available on multiple systems.

Pro
Consistent UI

ed has a consistent user interface and error reportage.

Pro
Syntax highlighting

Kate supports syntax highlighting for over 180 languages, from Assembler to Zsh

Pro
By far one of the best and lightest text editors.

Notepads alternative. (for the windows users)

Pro
Project mode

Kate allows you to make projects to simplify the organisation of your code. This brings in additional organization of an IDE without the overhead.

Pro
Edit over FTP, SSH, or other protocols

Kate uses KDE's input and output libraries to read and write files, allowing seamless integration with FTP, SMB, SFTP, and many other protocols.

Pro
Fast and minimaistic

Kate is pretty fast and lightweight. This helps it with it's start up speed.

Pro
Integrated terminal

Has a terminal that can sync to the location of your document, letting you compile or run your program quickly or run quick commands, all without leaving the editor.

Pro
Vi entry mode

Kate has a vi entry mode.

Pro
Thriving plugin ecosystem

Lots of plugins allow Kate to expand or shrink based on your needs. It includes GDB integration, XML completion, and symbol viewing to speed up programming.

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Cons

Con
Obsolete

There's absolutely no need for ed when you have sed and ex.

Con
Not a lot of features

While extremely fast and simple, Ed is simply not for programming for a long time because it lacks a lot of important features. It should be used instead for quick edits.

Con
Not a persistent UI

You can only view portions of a file through search or regular expression commands. You cannot scan or scroll through a file using the available screen real-estate.
It's not too dissimilar in use to command-line tools (such as grep and sed) for editing a file. In fact, both grep and sed are based on how interaction is performed with Ed.