Here’s the Deal

ed vs Textadept

16 10

43 3

When comparing ed vs Textadept, the Slant community recommends Textadept for most people. In the question“What are the best programming text editors?” Textadept is ranked 16th while ed is ranked 55th. The most important reason people chose Textadept is:

Both text and GUI versions behave mostly the same, just the way notepad users would expect it to. Like shift+arrows - select, Ctrl+c - copy, Ctrl+o - open a file.

Specs

PlatformsWindows; OSX; *nix

Collaborative editingNo

Column selectionNo

ScriptableYes

Supported remote file editing protocolsNone

PlatformsWindows, macOS, Linux, BSD

Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking

Common Questions

What are the best programming text editors?

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
Has both GUI and TUI

Both text and GUI versions behave mostly the same, just the way notepad users would expect it to.
Like shift+arrows - select, Ctrl+c - copy, Ctrl+o - open a file.

Pro
Cross-platform

It's available for Windows, Mac and Linux.

Pro
Easily written plugins

You can write plugins pretty easily.

Here is the API doc, quite compact.

Here is a module which adds a support for ctags.

Pro
Small and portable

Has very few dependencies, and very small footprint. Can be copied to a new system in a moment, unpacked and be at your service.

Pro
Scriptable

Has a built-in lua engine.

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
Community

Does not have an IRC channel or some kind of forum where a community of developers/plugin writers could evolve around. Has a mailing list which is said to be active but that does not feel that attractive.