You just don't like modal editing. Switching from emacs to ed due to emacs' slowness is by no means a reasonable choice considering being limited to line-by-line editing. Ed is bare-bones and over time you will realize that you need other things that majority of other editors have, then add multi-line view support, then many other things. Emacs can be faster with native lisp compilation, but if you are adamant you want to go full bare bones, you'd be happy with nano, which has some subset of Emacs keybindings and supports syntax highlighting. If you call vim (let alone neovim) a monstrosity, you could go for vi or helix. Switching from emacs to ed is a dumb choice and rewriting ed from scratch in Rust with syntax highlighting is another dumb choice, when you could fork the thing - your rewrite doesn't even have 100 commits in 2 years, which probably indicates there's not a lot of innovation going on.
If you just wanted to rewrite ed in Rust - sure, go ahead, but just say it. My point is the reasons for hired you stated do not sound like reasonable choices at all.
You seem to misunderstand "freezing up on me" to be about slowness, that was a crash leaving the window open that occurred every so often for me despite a relatively simple emacs setup. My initial frustration resided in the complexity of emacs and vim and the many potential failure points that come from that, wherefore I looked into simpler historical editors and ended up trying out ed. (I considered vi, but decided that ed was a good first step if I went there anyways.)
I didn't blindly decide to switch to ed, I tried it out and found its commands to suit my editing methodology, the lack of keybindings to help make it work well on dvorak and the line editing workflow to save me from often manually moving my cursor "long distances". Due to how much I liked the concept I wanted to make improvements.
(I have also looked into vi but I don't quite like the cursor focused way of working it entails, and really dislike how it depends on keybindings (at least hjkl).)
Regarding why I rewrote it rather than forking the C repo you can look into my other comment that explains what I gained from it. And of course I did it because I wanted to, it's not like I'm getting paid for this.
It is well established that commits aren't a great way to judge anything, and innovation is especially hard to judge by any metric. Feel free to look at the usage documentation for add-ed https://docs.rs/add-ed/latest/add_ed/ if you wish to quickly gather some insight into the design, to base your judgement upon.
(btw, some corrections
ed arguably is a modal editor with default command mode and an input mode entered by `a` and `i` and left with either ctrl+c or a lone `.` on a line.
The hired repo has around 100 commits since it is only the syntax highlighting UI, CLI and config handling; the `ed` runtime implementation is in https://github.com/sidju/add-ed with around 200 commits.
Good grief, there’s no need to be so mean about it, there’s nothing wrong with this person building a simple tool to suit their needs. Linus has his own hacked-up editor and few would call him dumb.
I'd like to know what kind of deluded I am.