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 30th while ed is ranked 49th. 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
Question Ranking
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 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
All command characters are shown at the bottom of the editor.
Pro Available on almost every Linux system as default
Almost like vi (vim), you can find nano on most Unix-like systems.
Pro Lightweight and bug free
Very stable editor that never hang / leak or crash
Pro Most of the languages supported
Syntax coloring is available for most of the programming language.
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 emails and blog posts, it's probably not a good editor for programmers or really anyone that needs an editor more than once in a while.
Con Individual keybindings
You have to learn keybindings especially for Nano.