excelano/ved

ved — the verbose ed

A verbose clone of ed, the original Unix line editor, written in pure-stdlib Rust. ved adds friendly error messages, command confirmations, long-form command aliases, and a built-in help reference while preserving close compatibility so most scripts written for real ed run against ved unchanged.

Full tutorial: https://excelano.com/ved/tutorial/

Why

ed's one-character error messages and silent operations make it notoriously hard to learn. ved keeps ed's interface and behavior but tells you what happened: deleted 3 lines (2-4) instead of silence, ? no match instead of ?, and help prints a command reference without leaving the editor. If you already know ed, ved will be immediately familiar. If you're learning, ved explains what's going on.

Install

Debian and Ubuntu

Add the Excelano apt repository once (one-time setup):

curl -fsSL https://excelano.com/apt/setup.sh | sudo sh

Then install it, so apt upgrade keeps it current:

sudo apt install ved

Both amd64 and arm64 packages ship with every release.

Homebrew

On macOS or Linux, tap and trust the repository once — Homebrew gates third-party taps behind explicit trust (one-time setup):

brew tap excelano/tap
brew trust excelano/tap

Then install it, so brew upgrade keeps it current:

brew install ved

Windows