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!!!
Ed is something that everybody should know, but nobody should ever use unless they need to.
I never use it normally, but when I'm working on a client system through a shit VPN on their shit network and vi takes 10 seconds to refresh the screen, I'm glad I know ed. When I'm on some esoteric ancient system that doesn't know any sort of terminal info that I can feed it, so a full-screen editor turns into a jumbled fucking nightmare, I'm glad I know ed.
So if you don't know ed, go learn it. Wait a week, then refresh it. Then when you need it, you'll be glad you know it. Otherwise you don't ever need to think about it again.
It helps that ed is so fucking easy to learn that you can do it in like 10 minutes; and that's learning all the functionality front-to-back.
Eli Thompson
I unironically use ed when I want to keep prior terminal output on the screen while I edit. It's actually not bad — it does exactly what it's supposed to do and does it well.
Blake Kelly
tbh I dream of making an ed fork that supports modern features like arrow keys and calling up files from the shell
You are now aware that a huge part of the appeal of line-oriented text editors is the avoidance of bloat.
Anthony Morris
Adding features to ed is missing the point.
Ryder Roberts
Not really. The point of ed in modern times is not to be extremely small, it's to still work when your terminal is so primitive/fucked that it can only manage a shell. An ed with more features doesn't break with that use case. GNU ed has useful extensions.
Aaron Collins
It's an original UNIX utility. The point is to do one thing and do it well. Being able to open a file in ed with ed file.txt rather than ede file.txt would not really be adding more functions to ed so much as helping it be a better editor. I'm not suggesting packaging the damn thing with an Eliza plugin.
