Here’s the Deal

ed vs BBEdit

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When comparing ed vs BBEdit, the Slant community recommends BBEdit for most people. In the question“What are the best programming text editors?” BBEdit is ranked 31st while ed is ranked 55th. The most important reason people chose BBEdit is:

BBEdit is commercial software, the paid counterpart to their free application Textwrangler. Though BBEdit comes off as pricey, this allows for stable and consistent updates from the developers. BBEdit has been around since 1992.

Specs

Collaborative editingNo

PlatformsWindows; OSX; *nix

Supported remote file editing protocolsNone

Column selectionNo

ScriptableYes

Collaborative editingNo

PlatformsMac

Supported remote file editing protocolsYes

LicenseProprietary

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
Stable development, been around for decades

Pro
Can open very large files

Pro
Just about every feature is already built in

No searching for plug-ins that may or may not work.

Pro
Great customer support

The developer is very responsive to bug reports and feature suggestions.

Pro
Native application

Follows platform standards.

Pro
Built-in FTP/SFTP browser

BBEdit can open files directly from, and save them to, any available FTP server. It can also open and save files directly via SFTP (SSH File Transfer Protocol).

Pro
Great JAMStack environment

You can build the static site of your dreams without needing any external assistants. Although it does not process LESS, SASS, or SCSS files, BBEdit's includes are very powerful.

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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.