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Add to SafariWhen comparing ed vs Lime, the Slant community recommends ed for most people. In the question“What are the best programming text editors?” ed is ranked 55th while Lime is ranked 80th.
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 Free and open source
Lime is open source and free to use, unlike Sublime.
Pro Almost as good as Sublime Text
Lime is very useful, powerful, and clean. It has a sleek UI (as compared to Sublime) but is generally quite similar, if not better in some respects, than Sublime Text.
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 Doesn't have an installer
You need to build Lime from source yourself, which may be out of many people's skill level.
