When comparing ed vs Programmer's Notepad, the Slant community recommends Programmer's Notepad for most people. In the question“What are the best programming text editors?” Programmer's Notepad is ranked 35th while ed is ranked 55th. The most important reason people chose Programmer's Notepad is:
Programmer's Notepad has support for regular expression replacing.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion 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 Regex replace support
Programmer's Notepad has support for regular expression replacing.
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 Windows only
Programmer's Notepad is only available for Windows.