The ed editor brings me joy. I am a long time vim user and software developer. At home in the terminal I appreciate a simple interface. Lately, I find myself coding on my phone. With limited screen real estate and a touch keyboard I appreciate a tool developed in the time of teletypes. During an era where keystrokes mattered and printing was an expensive and time consuming task the ed editor was born.
Ed is a minimalist environment. It only prints to the screen what it has been asked. It doesn't even waste screen real-estate with modern conveniences like a prompt character.
But don't underestimate it's power. It has powerful features, it can shell out to do work, read command outputs into the buffer, find replace text using regular expressions, apply commands to multiple lines with a single command.
I no longer carry a laptop with me when I travel. I find the bulk more hassle than its worth. On holiday, I prefer to fill my days with meaningful activities. But, I am a codaholic, I relax deeply by typing into a terminal.
At least that's what I tell myself. My experience with more sophisticated editors, like helix or vim, on a touch screen requires too many key presses. In ed, commands are single letters, the line editing nature of the editor places the current line to the most recently modified line. Further edits can be made using single letters. Entering append or insert mode can be achieved by pressing a or i just like vim but unlike vim, ed gives a visual clue that you've left insert mode, with a . that stays on screen.