When comparing ed vs nano, the Slant community recommends nano for most people. In the question“What are the best programming text editors?” nano is ranked 14th while ed is ranked 55th. The most important reason people chose nano is:
Nano includes only the bare minimum of functionality needed to edit documents making it very simple.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Tight control over what's displayed, within terminal window
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 Easy to use
Nano includes only the bare minimum of functionality needed to edit documents making it very simple.
Pro Built-in cheat sheet for shortcuts
Shortcuts for common commands are shown at the bottom of the editor.
Pro Available on almost every Linux system as default
Similar to vi (vim), you can find nano on most Unix-like systems (even on Cygwin).
Pro Most of the languages supported
Syntax coloring is available for most of the programming language.
Pro Lightweight and bug free
Very stable editor that never hangs / leaks or crashes.
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.
Con Limited feature set
While nano is fine for writing blog posts or doing quick modifications, it's probably not suitable for programmers or someone who needs to work on an editor for an extensive period of time.
Con Uncommon keybindings
Nano uses a strange set of default keybindings, which is totally different than Vim, Emacs, VSCode and Sublime.