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I'm curious, why is it essential? I'm a bit of a MUD enthusiast myself, and I've never had to use ed. On the other hand, my favorite MUD's long-form editor (like for newsposts and journal pages) has an ed-like design.

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For making changes on the mud itself, there was no other way to write code unless you were an admin and had direct machine access.

There are some vi-like mud editors out there, but they were always wonky when I tried them, and caused more problems than they were worth (weird screen redraws, keys stopped working randomly, etc.). That said, I believe Dead Souls mudlib[1] may ship with one now, but I haven't looked at the lib in a few years, so I can't say for sure.

[1] http://dead-souls.net/

EDIT: link to dead souls FAQ entry on this topic: http://dead-souls.net/ds-admin-faq.html#144

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