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Add to SafariWhen comparing ed vs Gedit, the Slant community recommends Gedit for most people. In the question“What are the best programming text editors?” Gedit is ranked 22nd while ed is ranked 55th. The most important reason people chose Gedit is:
There are tons of [plugins](https://wiki.gnome.org/action/show/Apps/Gedit/PluginsLists?action=show&redirect=Gedit%2FPlugins) for productivity available in many different workflows, such as a dictation plugin, an encryption add-on, a whitespace remover, and more.
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 Plugins allow for added functionality and customization
There are tons of plugins for productivity available in many different workflows, such as a dictation plugin, an encryption add-on, a whitespace remover, and more.
Pro Great UI
The UI is lean and minimal. Everything feels quite fast and it is easy to add custom shortcuts for doing things like compiling, deploying, or testing.
Pro Available on all systems that use Gnome
Gedit is the official text editor for Gnome and it's available wherever any version of Gnome is installed. With thousands of people using it daily and not even realizing it.
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 Last line bug
Sometimes the last line of text is not visible.
Con Confusing interface
For example, finding anything in the settings menu is hard. Most other text editors use Edit->Preferences for managing settings but this is not the case for Gedit.
Con Faster than Atom but Slower than Geany
Not bad editor. Very similar to Geany, but Geany works faster and has more features.
Con Not a lot of features
Gedit is a text editor. Though it's simple and fast, it misses a lot of features, most notably auto-complete for several languages.
