Here’s the Deal

ed vs Spacemacs

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When comparing ed vs Spacemacs, the Slant community recommends Spacemacs for most people. In the question“What are the best Linux text editors?” Spacemacs is ranked 13th while ed is ranked 22nd. The most important reason people chose Spacemacs is:

Spacemacs is just a well-configured Emacs distribution with community-sourced best in class plugins and layers selected to take the setup pain out of Emacs. Evil mode gives the Vim bindings and modes for fast editing, while Helm makes everything discoverable to make learning to be more productive simple and unintrusive.

Specs

Collaborative editingNo

Column selectionNo

PlatformsWindows; OSX; *nix

ScriptableYes

Supported remote file editing protocolsNone

No specs yet!

Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking

Common Questions

What are the best Linux 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
Preconfigured emacs distro

Pro
VIM Keybindings with EMACS ecosystem

EMACS ecosystem and language support is best in show. The EMACS is a great IDE that was in search of a good text editor. Spacemacs makes EMACS have a good text editor.

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
Emacs is slow

Emacs is single threaded which means that if you enable all the great features you might be used to from Vim, it will run noticeably slower which can be quite frustrating at times. There are efforts at a concurrent Emacs, but they don't seem to be going anywhere.