@anewgene While you wait for this issue to be resolved, you might be interested in micro text editor which is similar to ne (shortcuts) and is already packaged.

So, this is basically ed. :D
Agreed with @skmlcd , micro is in repo and it's easy to use. Can be extend with plugin written in Lua, and support for keyboard shortcut like ctrl+c for copy and ctrl+v for paste.

still think ne would be good to be added, and don't think it's any similar to ed. But yes, micro would be a good alternative, I will give it a try for now.

What does this do that the other already packaged editors don't do? (e.g. Micro, Vim, Emacs, etc.)

Feature-wise, I think ne is sitting between nano and Vim/Emacs. Easy to use, yet still comes with a lot of useful features, including autocompletion. All of its features are organized in menus. You can see a screenshot here (http://beforewisdom.com/blog/tech/ne-nice-editor/). For beginners, you can just use the menu for certain actions if you don't remember the shortcuts. I like to use shortcuts too, but I found myself I still need to check the menus sometimes to remind me the shortcut for some actions I don't use very often.

I'm not a vim or emacs guy, and never find I need to be. For my local coding projects, I would use Sublime-text or Atom. For minor edits I need to make, especially editing on a server, I need to use a terminal text editor. I chose ne for that purpose.

Ne is very easy to install in almost all major linux distros, typically included in the official repositories. Newer editor like micro is a close option, but feature-wise, I like ne is still better by far. I also like to use the same terminal editor both locally and all the servers I need to access. Micro might need a bit more work to get installed on those servers (e.g. on Ubuntu server, you will need to either compile from source or add a custom ppa).

Anyway, I think ne would be a nice (and should be easy to package) addition to Solus as well, just like other distros.

BTW, I noticed that ne is also mentioned here: https://itsfoss.com/command-line-text-editors-linux/

@anewgene I think micro (because it is written in Go) is a single statically linked binary (for download) that you can simply copy to /usr/bin on server and you can use it. No compiling nor external repository (PPA) needed. Obviously this way it won't update automatically. Not trying to dismantle your argument about ne editor, just throwing it out there if it is of any use to you.

Must admit the menus in ne look pretty convenient.

Currently trying to build this package fyi. @DataDrake, the build is failing because gcc isn't symlinked to c99. Do you have any suggestions on what to do here?

In the setup : phase:

sed -i "s|CC=c99|CC=gcc" src/makefile

Got it. I'll upload the patch most likely tomorrow. Thanks for your help!

Tested. Works great. Thanks!