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Add to SafariWhen comparing ed vs Slap, the Slant community recommends Slap for most people. In the question“What are the best programming text editors?” Slap is ranked 47th while ed is ranked 55th. The most important reason people chose Slap is:
Slap supports mouse keybindings even though it works inside the terminal and also through SSH.
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 First-class mouse support
Slap supports mouse keybindings even though it works inside the terminal and also through SSH.
Pro Uses desktop-like keybindings
Slap features configurable keybindings (Ctrl+S, Ctrl+Z, etc).
Pro Great terminal interface
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 Requires node.js
Slap is written in JavaScript and it requires something to interpret it in a local machine. That something is node.js, but for people who don't need node, it would be a hindrance and an overkill to install node just to use a simple text editor. Furthermore, it can only be used remotely if the remote machine has node installed.
Con CLI only
Slap only runs through the terminal.
