When comparing ed vs RJ TextEd, the Slant community recommends ed for most people. In the question“What are the best programming text editors?” ed is ranked 55th while RJ TextEd is ranked 59th.
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 Very powerful web (PHP, ASP, JavaScript, HTML and CSS) development editor.
The functionality extends beyond text files and includes support for CSS/HTML editing with integrated CSS/HTML preview, spell checking, auto completion, HTML validation, templates and more.
Pro Full-featured
RJ TextEd is a full-featured portable text editor with code auto-completion, syntaxt highlighting, spell checker, auto indentation, and much more.
Pro Freeware
RJ TextEd is released as freeware.
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
Only the Windows version of RJ TextEd is available.