James Freer jessejazza3.uk@gmail.com
As to learning sed i think from what i've looked at it may be easier to learn vim. I do know some vim and it's not that difficult to master a dozen commands initially to do basics and after that one picks up additional ones gradually. The thing that's 'foreign' to me with editors is that while there are so many - there are very few (one i think) with CUA bindings and only one console editor with 'linebreak'. Emacs (as you haven't mentioned it!) - i'm sure it's very powerful and good but it's somehow just impregnable to me... lovely huge reference manual but such hard reading.
I don't see why you'd need to learn sed (or vim) unless you're in my line of work, developing websites and working on servers. I just offered a sed program as a tool for unwrapping a text file.
One reason that there are few editors with CUA bindings is that Common User Access is misnamed: it's not common - it's DOS more-or-less.
Worse, most Unix terminals don't distinguish the Alt key from ESC, Alt is grabbed by some and the CUA keystrokes Shift-Del, Ctrl-Ins and Shift-Ins aren't passed consistently. What editor implements CUA?
Emacs is very powerful, but you don't need to understand it all to edit things - just like you don't need to understand the engine fully to drive a car. If you start Emacs, there are nice menus File, Edit and so on along the top - access them with a mouse on a graphical session, or with F10 (the CUA menu key!) on most terminal sessions (and ESC then backquote on the few others).
Hope that helps,