Here’s the Deal

ed vs nano

14 10

51 16

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 24th while ed is ranked 61st. 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

PlatformsWindows; OSX; *nix

Collaborative editingNo

Column selectionNo

ScriptableYes

Supported remote file editing protocolsNone

Platformsmacosx,linux

Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking

Common Questions

What are the best programming 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
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.

Ad
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.