I made a serious attempt at using ed(1) for a few weeks. Read the book by Michael Lucas and everything. In the end, I kind of do want to see the file I'm editing, etc. But, some features, or lack of features, stuck with me. Do I need a menu item to count words in the file? That's why we have wc -w after all. This can be said about a lot of functionality built into editors. It made me really appreciate the idea of programs that do one thing, and can be combined. But yes, in the end it was too much for me, mostly because I'm not good enough with coreutils.