nved
A small terminal text editor that feels like a REPL rather than a full-screen application. You print a range of lines by number, climb into the printed block with the arrow keys, and edit it in place. There is no alternate screen and no takeover of your terminal: output scrolls normally and your scrollback stays intact, the way cat or an old line editor leaves it.
nved is a from-scratch descendant of ved, an ed clone. Where ved replays commands against text, nved lets you move a real cursor through committed lines and change them directly. It is deliberately small and single-purpose — one window, one buffer — and best suited to dialing in a specific part of a file by line number, not to scrolling through large files.
Install
Debian and Ubuntu
Add the Excelano apt repository once (one-time setup):
curl -fsSL https://excelano.com/apt/setup.sh | sudo shThen install it, so apt upgrade keeps it current:
sudo apt install nvedHomebrew
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/tapThen install it, so brew upgrade keeps it current:
brew install nvedWindows
With WinGet, so winget upgrade keeps it current:
winget install Excelano.nvedOr download the windowsamd64 zip from the releases page and unzip it. Either way, run nved from Windows Terminal: nved draws with ANSI escape sequences, which the modern terminal renders but the legacy console host (conhost) does not — so a recent Windows 10 or 11 with Windows Terminal is the target.