Why did you/would you uninstall ed or nano? It's not like they're taking up a lot of disk space. I mean, I don't ever use them either, but they're not getting in my way or anything.
Ed? Maybe because I only ever typo into it, but as I said, I don't think I removed it anyway.
Nano... to be honest, mostly to mess with anyone who'd want to use it. There is no need for it to be on my system, at least not for me, so it's perfectly logical to remove it. But an additional reason is that nano is a terrible editor that nobody should use anyway. Might as well open Geany or something with mouse support if they're not going to take advantage of vi keys (I'm talking about my own laptop with a screen anyway).
I could understand getting rid of nano. For some users, apt-get remove might be the easiest way they can think of for not defaulting to having nano called from other applications, as opposed to finding out about the proper way that Debian would like you to use. Most users would likely know about apt-get long before they ever chance across update-alternatives, (or whatever today's editor-default-selection-method-of-choice is, if it's not that anymore).
I suspect that there are a range of user antipatterns due to either not knowing, or not having the time or inclination to lookup this month's correct method of doing some given task, and people will default to using old methods or silly workarounds.
If you get 100% of your software through the package manager, sure. If not, then manually uninstalling things that have been standard on Unix since version 1 isn't very smart.
gNewSense is not a Debian version unless they gave sid a name, but this is Debian Stretch. If gNewSense (what a terrible name) is a distribution, they might have chosen to install it for you.
Apologies, I should have clarified: gNewSense [1] is a FSF sponsored distro based on Debian with a freed kernel and free packages (basically the equivalent of Debian main). gNewSense is currently at version 4.0 and based on Debian Wheezy.
lucb1e is absolutely right, in Debian wheezy itself, ed is an 'optional' package and not installed by default from the live iso (wheezy 7.11) I just checked. Just one of those choices people make I guess, or, as others have pointed out above, it might well be a dependency of something that I have installed since on my gNewSense install [2].
The full name of Debian is Debian GNU/Linux; the GNU part stands for "GNU is not UNIX". You have to go to a FreeBSD- or an illumos-
based operating system for UNIX.
Right, well, even on debian.org there is no mention of GNU. For what it's worth, to compensate, I've renamed my Cinnamon system menu to "GNU" (so I have a GNU button permanently visible on the left bottom) because they are indeed underrepresented next to Linux. Only in my /etc/issue I can find "Debian GNU/Linux" but it's still a bit of a mouthful, like saying The United States of North America or something when America is clear enough.
I think vi is a perfectly sensible choice as the always-there editor.