I enjoyed Katolaz's ed tutorial [0], I found it a great way to learn a useful subset of ed commands. I haven't used a line editor since the 80s, but the simplicity is compelling for minor edits, or even glog posts like this one :). A nice trick for formatting within ed if you have 'par' installed is this: e !par P=[ Ew70 < % That left-justifies (add a 'j' for full justification) the current file to a width of 70 but also leaves untouched any lines that start with '[', like our markdown-style link lists. Another tip that greatly increases the usability of ed is to run it under rlwrap, which gives you GNU readline editing and command history: rlwrap ed file.txt Is all it takes. [0]: gopher://katolaz.net/0/ed_tutorial.txt