Ah. I guess I didn't express myself very clearly. I'm not advocating starting with 'ed' and transitioning to 'vi'.
I'm an emacs user myself. But as you know, emacs is not always installed by default (especially on remote server installations). 'vi' is always there, but I already know and prefer emacs. 'ed' is also always there, and catches some corner cases 'vi' doesn't.
As a bonus to knowing 'ed' (in addition to a fullblown editor), should the occasion arise when it's convenient to have a visual editor and emacs is not installed, your knowledge of 'ed' will allow you to do useful things with 'vi', even if you never normally use it.
As to what sysadmin jobs call for, having knowledge of 'ed' is not something I would put in the requirements, but it is something I would ask during an interview as it would hint at knowledge of the myriad of obscure tools that unix has, and/or having tackled delicate problems that would have required a fallback to 'ed' in the past.
As such we're mostly in agreement I think. I agree there are no compelling reasons for learning 'ed' as your primary text-editor. But there are compelling reasons against not having a working knowledge of 'ed', although it depends to a large extent on your field of endeavour.
As to what sysadmin jobs call for, having knowledge of 'ed' is not something I would put in the requirements, but it is something I would ask during an interview as it would hint at knowledge of the myriad of obscure tools that unix has, and/or having tackled delicate problems that would have required a fallback to 'ed' in the past.
As such we're mostly in agreement I think. I agree there are no compelling reasons for learning 'ed' as your primary text-editor. But there are compelling reasons against not having a working knowledge of 'ed', although it depends to a large extent on your field of endeavour.