On 2026-07-27 19:03,  Artyom Bologov wrote:
┃Is there maybe a possibility that GNU ed(1) (as the one most expansive
┃and portable) might support BSD-style word boundaries?

It really depends on the regex library that ed is linked against.
GNU regex does not support [[:<:]] or [[:>:]] for word boundaries.
You could ask the Gnulib folks about adding this.

For what it's worth, the \< and \> operators are historical - they
originated on the BSD platform, so that is your best bet at
compatibility. For instance, both Solaris and FreeBSD support them.

As the original author of *BSD ed, I can say with confidence that
these operators used to work across all distributions. So you might
also consider taking up the issue of restoring support for \< and \>
with any *BSD distribution that removed them.

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