Ed Cheat Sheet

What's Ed?

This post is not intended as a general introduction to Ed however the essentials you may need to know are that:

• Ed was the text editor written by Ken Thompson while initially developing Unix.
• It is famed for its terseness, often giving no error messages or any form of communication to the user at all.
• With just a few commands you can probably match the speed you work in in your regular text editor.

A more general view of Ed can be found here.

Cheat Sheet

Note that X and Y are used to indicate user-given values.
FILE is used to indicate a user-given filename.

Single Commands

Command	Description
(Any number)	Set current line to given value if line exists.
P	Display prompt.
p	Print current line.
n	Same as 'p' but print with line numbers.
H	Display verbose errors.
a	Append : insert new line and start editing.
i	Insert: start editing on line above current line.
c	Replace current line.
w	Write (save) file
z	Print as much of the file as will fit on the screen. Set current line as last visible line.
l	Place a $ at the end of a command to show where a line ends, useful for showing trailing white space.
u	Undo last command.
$	Go to last line of file.
+	Go to next line.
-	Go to previous line.
=	Current line number.
.	Exit edit mode.
,	Symbol that indicates the entire file.
;	Current line to end of file.

Compound Commands

Command	Description
wq	Write and quit.
,p	Print whole file to screen.
,n	Print current line with line number.
XmY	Move line X and insert it after line Y.
,np	Print numbered listing of all lines.
XzY	Starting on line X, print the next Y lines.
Xd	Delete line X.
Xr FILE	Read a file in and insert it at line X.
X,Yj	Join line X to Y.
XtY	Copy line X to Y.
XW FILE	Append line X to another file.
X,YW FILE	Append lines X through Y to another file.
f X	When saving the file, save it as X (effectively a save as option).
e X	Switch to editing file X.
E X	Force switch to other file without checking if current file has been saved.
X,Yw FILE	Save the text between lines X and Y to another file.
!X	Run command X outside of ed and return.
!!	Run previous external command again.
r !X	Read external command X into the current file.
w !X	Write your current program to another file/program. This functions similarly to Unix Pipes.
kX	Assign a bookmark called X. Bookmarks can only be assigned to the current line.
'X	Go to bookmark X.
/X/	Search for X on current line.
g/X/p	Search for X on all lines and print matching lines.
g/X/np	Search for X on all lines and print matching lines with line numbers.
$=	Print last line number.
.=	Display current line number.