GNU ed is an 8-bit clean implementation of the POSIX line-oriented text editor. Ed is the "standard" text editor in the sense that it is the original editor for Unix, and thus widely available. For most purposes, however, it is superseded by full-screen editors such as GNU Emacs or GNU Moe.
| Tags | Text Editors |
|---|---|
| Licenses | GPLv3+ |
| Operating Systems | POSIX |
| Implementation | C |
Recent releases


Release Notes: The testsuite no longer feeds shell scripts to ed. The "configure" script now accepts options with a separate argument.


Release Notes: No user-visible changes were made. Ed now stops reading stdin when reaching the real End Of File the first time. Previously it needed to reach EOF twice.


Release Notes: Shows the "Try 'ed --help' for more information." message if a bad option is given on the command line. Quote characters in messages have been changed as advised by GNU Coding Standards. The description of address offsets in the manual and a link to the Bash manual have been fixed. The configure option "--datadir" has been renamed to "--datarootdir" to follow GNU Standards. The target "install-bin" has been added to the Makefile.


Release Notes: The description of address offsets in the manual has been fixed.


Release Notes: Ed now shows the "Try 'ed --help' for more information." message if a bad option is given on the command line. Quote characters in messages have been changed as advised by GNU Coding Standards. The "--datadir" configure option has been renamed to "--datarootdir" to follow GNU Standards.
Recent comments
30 Mar 2012 07:03
Really good editor for Unix
23 Aug 2008 01:10
don't be so self deprecating!
Maybe the about section shouldn't be so self deprecating.
There are many good reasons still to have a decent line editor available on all systems. Some of those could be described instead of worrying about the other tools that don't really compare.
01 Jun 2007 17:39
Re: errors in ed-0.4
> there are a couple of glaring errors in signal.c:
Both errors will be fixed in version 0.6.
Next time, please use the mailing list to notify errors. Thanks.
17 Feb 2007 19:53
errors in ed-0.4
I'm sure Antonio Diaz means well, but there are a couple of glaring errors in signal.c:
In sigwinch_handler(), there is an executable statement before a declaration (when TIOCGWINSZ is defined). That works in C++, but not in C.
In set_signal(), the non-standard flag SA_RESTART is used. This should be conditionalized, as it is not supported on all flavours of Unix (including QNX Neutrino); POSIX does not in fact require it to be defined.
12 Jun 2002 23:15
excellent.
This is quite possibly one of the coolest projects I've ever seen announced on Freshmeat.