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Add to SafariWhen comparing ed vs qemacs (for quick emacs), the Slant community recommends qemacs (for quick emacs) for most people. In the question“What are the best programming text editors?” qemacs (for quick emacs) is ranked 42nd while ed is ranked 55th. The most important reason people chose qemacs (for quick emacs) is:
Including e.g. Chinese.
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 Input methods for most (human) languages
Including e.g. Chinese.
Pro Terminal and graphics mode
Supports the terminal mode with 'qemacs -nw' and a graphics mode.
Pro Good documentation and help
- Context sensitive shortcut help on F1.
- Good online documentation.
Pro Comfortable file browser
Easy to open and manage files (dired-mode).
Pro Supports many editing modes besides text
- Hex
- HTML / CSS
- Image
- Audio/video (maybe not the most sought after mode in a text editor, but, well, it's there)
Pro Full UTF-8 support
Including bi-directional writing.
Pro Super lightweight and fast
Pro Emacs like key-bindings
Use your muscle memory if you know Emacs already.
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.
