[rudin]

I think everyone should spend an evening trying to write in ed. Knowing that most of unix was written in this simple editor shows the power of tight constraints in design decisions and the creativity that can come from them. It also makes the whole cascade of editors ed/vi/vim/... more understandable.

[coliveira]

I did this exercise, and to tell the truth, it works better than "normal" editors for some tasks. For example, fixing bugs from a C compilation, checking a particular line, finding some structure on file based on regular expressions.

Nowadays, I use ed regularly whenever possible. I even wrote a blog post on my experiments:

http://coliveira.net/software/using-ed-the-standard-unix-edi...

[wazoox]

However ed is actually easier to use on a true teletype, where everything you print is actually... printed.