[sidju]

The original inspiration was part annoyance at how badly most editor's keybindings map to dvorak and part how modern editors sometimes crash.

With a command based editor you just type commands, no fancy keybindings that get jumbled when you have a different layout.

(And I have plans for writing fired, which is basically hired with a window to see the state of the buffer. It would still be strictly command based though, so not a vim remake.)

[sidju]

Oh, yes. I find ed to be excellently usable since the most common code editing operations are (in my perception) well supported in ed: - moving or copying chunks of code (`m` and `t` commands) - deleting or replacing chunks of code (`d` and `c`) - writing new code (`a` and `i`) - renaming stuff (`s` and `g`) - and rarely, small edits to existing code (`s` and `C` in hired)

As long as you write your code with plenty line-breaks it is often easy to just replace a line to make the change you want, so `s` and `C` are rarely needed (though I am weak and tend to use `C` quite often, for example to get the indentation right when adding lines).