ved — the verbose ed

A drop-in compatible 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 strict compatibility so any script written for real ed runs 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 works exactly the same. 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

Prebuilt binary (Linux and macOS)

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/excelano/ved/main/install.sh | sh

The installer downloads the right tarball for your platform from the GitHub release, verifies its checksum, and drops the binary into ~/.cargo/bin (or the equivalent on Windows). If ved isn't found on your PATH after installation, ensure ~/.cargo/bin is on it. Releases also ship raw tarballs (ved-*.tar.xz / .zip) for manual installation. To uninstall:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/excelano/ved/main/uninstall.sh | sh

That removes the binary from ~/.cargo/bin; ved stores nothing else on disk. You can also just rm ~/.cargo/bin/ved.

Windows

In PowerShell:

powershell -ExecutionPolicy ByPass -c "irm https://github.com/excelano/ved/releases/latest/download/ved-installer.ps1 | iex"

Cargo

If you have a Rust toolchain, install the latest release from crates.io:

cargo install ved

Build from source

ved requires only a Rust toolchain (1.85+ for edition 2024). No external crates, no C dependencies, no runtime.

cd ved
cargo build --release

The binary is at target/release/ved. To install system-wide:

make build                        # build as your user (needs cargo)
sudo make install                 # copy binary to /usr/local/bin
sudo make install PREFIX=/usr     # or specify a different prefix

To run without installing:

cargo run -- -p '* '

The -- separates cargo's flags from ved's. -p '* ' sets the command prompt (ed has no prompt by default).

Quick start

$ ved myfile.txt           # open a file
135                        # ved prints the byte count
* ,p                      # print all lines
Hello world
This is a test file
* 1s/Hello/Goodbye/       # substitute on line 1
Goodbye world
* g/test/n                # print lines matching "test" with numbers
2	This is a test file
* w                        # write back to the file
37
* q                        # quit

Commands

Command	Long form	Description
[.]a	append	Append text after the addressed line (end with .)
[.]i	insert	Insert text before the addressed line (end with .)
[.,.]c	change	Replace the addressed lines with new text (end with .)
[.,.]d	delete	Delete the addressed lines
[.,.]p	print	Print the addressed lines
[.,.]n	number	Print with line numbers
[.,.]l	list	Print with non-printing bytes as \NNN octal, ending $
[.,.+1]j	join	Join the addressed lines into one (default: . and next)
[.,.]m DEST		Move the addressed lines to after DEST (0 = top)
[.,.]t DEST		Copy the addressed lines to after DEST (0 = top)
[.,.]s/re/new/[g]		Substitute: replace regex matches in addressed lines
[.,.]s		Repeat the last substitute (pattern, replacement, flags)
[.,.]g/re/cmd		Global: run a command on every line matching a regex
[.,.]v/re/cmd		Inverse global: run a command on lines NOT matching
[.,.]w [file]		Write the addressed lines (default: all) to a file
e [file]		Edit: replace the buffer with a file's contents
r [file]		Read: append a file's contents after the addressed line
q	quit	Quit (warns on unsaved changes; repeat to force)
Q		Quit unconditionally
H	help	Print the command reference

Addresses

Addresses specify which lines a command operates on. Most commands default to the current line (.).

Address	Meaning
5	Line 5
.	Current line
$	Last line
+3 / -1	Relative to current line
,	All lines (shorthand for 1,$)
;	Current line to end (shorthand for .,$)
2,7	Lines 2 through 7

Regular expressions

ved implements POSIX Basic Regular Expressions (BRE) with a hand-written engine. No external regex library.

Syntax	Meaning
.	Any single character
*	Zero or more of the preceding element
^ / $	Start / end of line anchors
[abc]	Character class: matches a, b, or c
[^abc]	Negated class: matches anything except a, b, c
[a-z]	Range: matches any lowercase letter
\(...\)	Capturing group
\1 ... \9	Backreference to captured group
\0NN	Octal byte literal (3-digit, leading zero, range \000-\077)

In replacement strings: & expands to the whole match, \1-\9 expand to captured groups, \& is a literal ampersand, \0NN inserts the corresponding byte. The leading-zero requirement keeps \1-\9 reserved for backreferences; \037 is the ASCII unit separator, \011 is tab, \033 is escape.

As your default editor

ed was the original Unix $EDITOR, and because ved is drop-in compatible it serves the same role: it takes the file as an argument, writes your changes back when you w, and exits zero on q. That is exactly the contract git, crontab -e, and sudoedit expect, so ved slots straight in:

export EDITOR=ved

EDITOR names the line-editor slot, which is where ved belongs — tools reach for it as the fallback when no full-screen editor is set. As with ed, ved opens to a silent prompt rather than printing the file, so ,p is the first thing to type when git hands you a commit-message template: it prints the buffer, you edit it with the usual ed commands, then w and q. Quitting without writing leaves the file untouched, and git declines the empty commit.

For the full-screen VISUAL slot, nved is the companion — a cursor-driven descendant of ved that edits the printed block in place.

Implementation

2,684 lines of Rust across four modules, zero dependencies, 119 tests.

Module	Lines	Purpose
main.rs	1260	REPL, command dispatch, substitute/global/write/read
bre.rs	1057	BRE regex engine: compiler, matcher, replacement expander
address.rs	236	Address parser and resolver
buffer.rs	131	Line buffer with current-line tracking

The BRE engine started as a translation of Rob Pike's ~30-line recursive matcher from "The Practice of Programming," then grew bottom-up through a compile step (inspired by Ken Thompson's original ed), bracket expressions, capturing groups, and backreferences. The full history is in the git log.

Limitations worth knowing

Two limitations are inherited from ed and intentional, since changing them would make ved not-an-ed-clone:

• Newline-only record model. Lines are delimited by \n (or \r\n). The ASCII information separators (RS, GS, FS, US) used in some text formats as record separators do not create addressable lines — a file using RS to separate records but no newlines loads as a single ved line. Use l to make embedded separators visible within a line.
• UTF-8 only. Files are read via std::fs::read_to_string, which rejects invalid UTF-8. ved is a text editor, not a binary editor. UTF-8 text with multi-byte characters works; arbitrary binary does not. If a file looks like UTF-7 (the +ACI- escape from Scoutbook exports) or carries a UTF-16 BOM, ved prints a warning at startup with the iconv command needed to convert it, and w refuses to overwrite the original (saving edits as UTF-8 would silently corrupt the source). w <newname> to a different file still works as an escape valve.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.