When comparing ed vs Synwrite, the Slant community recommends ed for most people. In the question“What are the best programming text editors?” ed is ranked 55th while Synwrite is ranked 65th.
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 Clean interface
Synwrite has a clean and beautiful UI.
Pro Small size and portable
Synwrite's small size makes it very portable and usable even from a USB flash drive.
Pro Built-in FTP support
Built-in support for FTP allows the user to transfer and exchange files between different computers and accounts.
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
Synwrite is only available for Windows and it's not cross-platform.