All, Two things I associate with ed in general are "small footprint" (executable size, in memory, on screen, etc.) and "available everywhere when everything else fails" (either due to variations in other editors or computer failures). If GNU ed starts requiring plugin checks and a plugin framework, that is another point of failure, and it bloats the footprint.
While I don't think it's appropriate for a version of ed distributed by default with distros and Cygwin, Andrew might consider something similar for his version of ed, which as a general rule has more features than the GNU version. Alexander On Thu, Jan 15, 2026 at 2:04 PM Marco Atzeri <[email protected]> wrote: > > On 15/01/2026 20:06, Cameron Míċeál Tyre wrote: > > Hello everyone, > > > > Happy New Year! > > > > Antonio, this is purely my 2 cents worth. I think the magic of ed is its > > simplicity. Perhaps adding features should be a personal project for those > > who seek those features. > > > > Best regards, > > > > Cameron > > > > +1 > > On Cygwin "ed" is by large the smaller editor around > > $ ls -1s sed vi ed vim > 56K ed > 176K sed > 1.6M vi > 3.7M vim > > No need to change it. > > Regards > Marco > >
