To spare some of you some writing, I know this is a rather pointless, freakish question, but does anybody know 1) whether the N900 includes BusyBox by default and if so 2) whether the BusyBox build includes the ed text editor?

Thanks!

Yes.

I expect not, as previous Maemo releases have not included it. A shame, I know.

It doesn't:
but it should be straightforward to recompile the Debian (or Ubuntu) ed package.

http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed.msg.html
XD

I just use nano, I don't understand you elitists.

Thanks to all for the replies. Is it possible to replace the default BusyBox with a more feature-rich binary (instead of adding individual binaries, say for ed)? Do you need to be a grown-up hacker to do so?

Well you might be able to replace it with bash (I believe one of the packages in the repo is meant as replacement for busybox) that and you could compile coreutils (which is basically just a bunch of individual binaries). And if osso-xterm bothers you, there is ROXterm and perhaps other terminal emulators. Did you have a specific purpose in mind or is it simply a personal preference?

You also have vi...

And vim (which comes with ex) in extras. But ed is the standard text editor.

Standard text editor where? You can count on vi to be everywhere you look, but not on ed.

I was going for subtlety, but... there.