ed Really Is WorthwhileBeen playing around with learning ed (finally after more than three
decades since hearing about it) and I have to say, I feel completely
stupid that I didn’t pick it up before. It is drop dead easy once you
get the main concepts down, and since ed went on to influence tons of
other UNIX-y things (grep, sed, vim) having learned it makes me
more effective in those things. In other words, yes you should learn
“the standard UNIX editor” — perhaps even first — before learning other
stuff. Besides, you’ll have bragging rights for the rest of your life if
you do. You can shut down every idiotic editor debate with “I use ed,
the standard editor” and you won’t even be joking. The truth is, if you
are using vim to its full extent you are using ed (ex is the new
ed all the time). If you use sed, grep and a dozen other commands
you are using ed, which was the first to instigate all of those
things.