ed vs CodeRunner
When comparing ed vs CodeRunner, the Slant community recommends CodeRunner for most people. In the question“What are the best programming text editors?” CodeRunner is ranked 27th while ed is ranked 42nd. The most important reason people chose CodeRunner is:
Code Runner comes preinstalled with over 20 languages built in, and it's super easy to run simple programs.
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 Supports many different languages
Code Runner comes preinstalled with over 20 languages built in, and it's super easy to run simple programs.
Pro Fast and efficient
You can have multiple tabs open with multiple languages in at the same time and Code Runner still performs excellently. Searching through code is always instant and executing code is fast.
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 Working with very very large projects
Code runner is fantastic for shorter projects, although it can handle very large projects. It stops code completion when the program gets to be several thousands of lines long.