[jvns]

That book (Ed Mastery, https://mwl.io/nonfiction/tools#ed) is an April fool's joke, but it's a real book and I thought it was actually really good. I've still basically never used ed but it was fun to learn about and it helped me understand vim's history a little bit.

[bewuethr]

My favourite part about it is the "Manly McManface Edition" with masculine pronouns for double the price :D

https://www.tiltedwindmillpress.com/product/manly/

[cylinder714]

It has a prettier cover, too.

[denton-scratch]

I did use ed, ever so briefly. I was introduced to it when my employer brought-out a new machine that ran SVID. We talked to it through glass teletypes.

The commands in vi are based around the commands in ed. They belong to the same family. sed is also a family-member, and an amazing tool. But I won't be sorry if I never run into ed again. Essentially, it's a rudimentary editor with zero dependencies; it doesn't need a curses library, in particular. And it would work on a terminal with only a printer for output, which was useful, back then.

[GauntletWizard]

I still use ed - Ed formatted patches are great for retro computing, I would very rarely use it interactively, but scripting with it is surprisingly useful.

[bch]

I’ve used ed scripting in serious production work across thousands of hosts. It was nice to have that programmability but be able to “reason” with the entire file.