This is the reason why ed was originally "the standard editor". Of course, moving from teletypes to terminals made it quite irrelevant as we moved to ex/nvi, b

This is the reason why ed was originally "the standard editor". Of course, moving from teletypes to terminals made it quite irrelevant as we moved to ex/nvi, but ed still has its advantages. It only requires a kernel and a libc, forget even needing ncurses or termcap. It was running perfectly fine on an 11/40 running V6 on 250kB of memory, so it has stayed insanely resource efficient by today standards. It's not even that bad once the verbose errors are activated (H), and it's still better than using sed or cat > << to recover a partition.