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from Robert Elz:

> For people who are ever going to use ed, learning the whole thing, front
> to back, should take a half an hour.   It is very simple, and very consistent.
> The only part that should give anyone trouble is understanding regular
> expressions, but they're by no means peculiar to ed (if you can manage
> them in grep, they're the same...)   The other thing which might take
> some time is trying to figure out how to do something that ed can't
> easily do.   Typically in that situation it is simpler to just accept that
> it can't be done (you can always just re-type...) rather than attempting
> to work out how what ed can do might be bent into achieving what you want.
(snip)

You might read through the man page for ed, slowly and carefully, in a half
hour, but remembering everything when you need to edit a file in another matter.
I suppose you could make notes with pencil and paper, but then finding the
needed paper in a big pile is another matter.  Problem is when booting the
installation kernel from floppy disks or CD, or possibly DOSBOOT in the case of
i386, NetBSD is single-tasking just like DOS, and to switch between the man
page and the file you're editing, you need a second computer.