Add to Chrome
Add to Edge
Add to Firefox
Add to Opera
Add to Brave
Add to SafariWhen comparing ed vs Suplemon, the Slant community recommends Suplemon for most people. In the question“What are the best programming text editors?” Suplemon is ranked 51st while ed is ranked 55th. The most important reason people chose Suplemon is:
Multiple cursors & column selection allow versatile ways of editing.
Specs
Question 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 Native multi cursor editing on the command line
Multiple cursors & column selection allow versatile ways of editing.
Pro Low learning curve
Does not drown you in keyboard shortcuts or non-intuitive use-concepts as you start using it, but high-level functionality can still be easily accessed when the need for it arises.
Pro Mouse support
Scroll wheel works automatically. With mouse mode (F8) the cursor can be moved with a left-click to a desired position, and new cursors can be added with right clicks.
Pro No required dependencies
Pro Shows linting messages for Python code (requires flake8)
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 No region selection
Some selection features that are taken for granted in other editors are missing here. As they say in their documentation, if you want to copy and paste part of a line, you need to use the mouse to select it and copy with Ctrl + Shift + C.
