When comparing ed vs EverEdit, the Slant community recommends EverEdit for most people. In the question“What are the best programming text editors?” EverEdit is ranked 53rd while ed is ranked 57th. The most important reason people chose EverEdit is:
EverEdit is lightweight, making it very fast.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
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 Lightweight
EverEdit is lightweight, making it very fast.
Pro Extendable with plugins
EverEdit is extremely powerful and extends through various plugins that add a lot of useful features to it.
Pro Good regexp
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
EverEdit is not available for Linux and/or Mac.