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Add to SafariWhen comparing ed vs PSPad, the Slant community recommends PSPad for most people. In the question“What are the best programming text editors?” PSPad is ranked 24th while ed is ranked 55th. The most important reason people chose PSPad is:
PSPad is completely free to download and use.
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 Free
PSPad is completely free to download and use.
Pro Simple and small
PSPad is simple, small, and lightweight. It's also quite fast.
Pro Code highlighting for many languages
PSPad supports code highlighting for several languages.
Pro Portable version
Pro Column mode
Editing in column mode.
Pro Integrated HEX editor
Pro Accented words
In PSPad, the user can add accents to words.
Pro Integrated FTP client
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
It's only available for Windows.
Con No code folding
Does not support code folding.
Con No content assist
