Yes, there is a certain amount of duplication between install sets for
different ports.  The man pages are nearly identical across each port,
though there are a few port-specific pages.  I think that they are all
together in one tarball.  The /etc tarball should also be more or less
sharable.  Binaries can sometimes (often?) be shared between ports with
the same CPU (I understand that Amiga 68K and Mac 68K ports have the same
binaries, for example), needing only distinct kernels.


As for ed(1)...no, it's not what most people would call user-friendly.
It is a traditional old editor that you can find on every system.  It
doesn't present menus or use graphics of any kind.  But it is reasonably
powerful, and not too difficult to learn for basic tasks.

FreeBSD does have a user-friendly editor that ships with their base
system, I think.  There was talk about doing one for NetBSD.  Some of us
suggested that a short help-page for ed was a better idea, since ed is
easy to learn (if cryptic at first).  Neither approach was taken, so you
are left with /bin/ed and only ed's man-pages for help.  If you don't know
that ed is there, or don't know how to use it (and don't know about/can't
use the man pages) you are kind of stuck.

In your case you have other installed OS's.  ed is common so that you
should be able to use the man pages from another OS to get around NetBSD's
ed.  Also, I have a short (dense)  screenful of ed-help that I wrote; if
you like, I can send it.


  ``I probably don't know what I'm talking about.'' --rauch@math.rice.edu