I want to use ed as a proper text editor, but xed has so many features I can't turn it down anymore.
this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2025
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ED IS THE STANDARD TEXT EDITOR
You wouldn't use a "vi"itor or an "emacs"itor, you use an "ed"itor!
I would, however, use a "vi"sual editor.
newsflash, ed is also visual, i can see it on my terminal rn
I think that could be improved upon.
I use a samitor!
We do use a "vi"itor, it's called Vim/Neovim
?
"Ed is the standard text editor."
Ed, the greatest WYGIWYG editor of all.
ED IS THE TRUE PATH TO NIRVANA! ED HAS BEEN THE CHOICE OF EDUCATED AND IGNORANT ALIKE FOR CENTURIES! ED WILL NOT CORRUPT YOUR PRECIOUS BODILY FLUIDS!! ED IS THE STANDARD TEXT EDITOR! ED MAKES THE SUN SHINE AND THE BIRDS SING AND THE GRASS GREEN!!
When I use an editor, I don't want eight extra KILOBYTES of worthless help screens and cursor positioning code! I just want an EDitor!! Not a "viitor". Not a "emacsitor". Those aren't even WORDS!!!! ED! ED! ED IS THE STANDARD!!!
TEXT EDITOR.
When IBM, in its ever-present omnipotence, needed to base their "edlin" on a UNIX standard, did they mimic vi? No. Emacs? Surely you jest. They chose the most karmic editor of all. The standard.
Ed is for those who can remember what they are working on. If you are an idiot, you should use Emacs. If you are an Emacs, you should not be vi. If you use ED, you are on THE PATH TO REDEMPTION. THE SO-CALLED "VISUAL" EDITORS HAVE BEEN PLACED HERE BY ED TO TEMPT THE FAITHLESS. DO NOT GIVE IN!!! THE MIGHTY ED HAS SPOKEN!!!
/Quote
Nb WYGIWYG* is a play on WYSIWYG†
*What You Get Is What You Get
†What You See Is What You Get
Somehow, despite being the standard it doesn't come installed by default in any distro I've tried.
They all insist you use sed... that bloated thing!
Mint includes both ed and sed.
ed and sed arre different things. One edits files in place, interactively. The other edits streams i.e.batch processing.
ed is the precursor to vi. Similar commands. It's just you can only work on one line at a time.
One edits files in place, interactively. The other edits streams i.e.batch processing.
You want sed -i -f -
ed is also the precursor of sed, and of some other dozen of commands.
Yes ed begat sed, but sed works differently. It didn't replace ed. It did a different job.
Ed loads the file into a buffer which you edit in a random access fashion and then save. Sed collects a list of commands and then streams the file line by line, executing the commands as they match lines. In your example nothing happens until you've entered the whole editing script.
sed is a stream editor. A stream editor is used to perform basic text transformations on an input stream (a file or input from a pipeline). While in some ways similar to an editor which permits scripted edits (such as ed), sed works by making only one pass over the input(s), and is consequently more efficient. But it is sed’s ability to filter text in a pipeline which particularly distinguishes it from other types of editors.
I love the way they are selling this
It's like nano Vs the original pico
If your system has vi or a clone, try vi -e, or, if the symlink is set up, ex. Technically that's vi in ex mode, not ed per-se but it's about as similar as you're going to get without a lot of pointless bother.
is that vim's evil mode?
Comparison time!
ex is to ed as nano is to pico
That is, it's an editor that works in almost exactly the same way as the original, but it's by somebody else.
ex is to vi as vi is to vim, or C to C++.
That is, the latter grew out of and improved upon the former, but you can still use them like their forerunners if you really want, which is why vi has an ex mode and why you can still use pointers in C++ if you're sufficiently warped.
and how does qed, ed, ex and sed and grep relate to nano micro and pico in comparison? 🤔
qed was also a line editor but pre-dated and inspired ed, so that's pico to nano or ed to ex again, just even further back in time.
sed and grep grew out of commands within ed (or equivalent) so I guess you could say they're each kind of a knight's move two to the side and once backward from the direction of ex to vi. Backwards because they're simpler, but two to the side because they're not interactive.
As to what would be "backward but one to the side" in that analogy, that'd be something like a tool that asked questions about every line in a file and made changes accordingly. I don't think there's any such standard tool, but I can think of at least a couple of ways to write one.
I load the file into the memory and alter the memory bits manually.
With a magnetic needle and a steady hand ?
Can't do that with SSDs.
No, for an SSD, you have to remove it from power and either apply load to specific capacitors, or use concentrated bursts of radiation.
...anything is possible
I use ed too...
Except I have alias ed=$EDITOR and export EDITOR=nvim in my .zshrc x)
sam is the standard Plan 9 editor.
Naturally, vim is still acceptable.
Ed, the greatest WYGIWYG editor of all.
What you get is what you get?
Excuse me if this was the joke.
I always thought it was "What You Give Is What You Get".
You might not know that the defacto standard with editors and the new hot thing at the time that thing was written is WYSIWYG. So yes this was indeed the joke.
Sill och nubbe - JA TACK.
Rösta JA till proposition 5!
i concede, you are too chad for me to even be in same plane of existence.
Real men use Butterfly
That's part of the bloat in emacs.