threads send and replies send publish to Ed under your own name. Both are mutations: they print a plan, ask y/N on an interactive terminal, and require --yes everywhere else. See Mutations for the general rules this section assumes.
Posting publishes publicly (or to staff, with --private) and cannot be undone from this tool. There is no threads delete or replies delete command. Review the plan with --dry-run before you send anything you’re not sure about.
Posting has only been tested against simulated Ed responses, not against Ed itself. --dry-run previews the plan and what would be sent, but it doesn’t call Ed, so it can’t confirm Ed will accept it. Treat your first real post as a test until you’ve confirmed it landed the way you expected.

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Post a new thread

--title is required. The body comes from exactly one of --body, --body-file, or — on an interactive terminal, when neither flag is given — your $EDITOR. Passing both --body and --body-file is a usage error, and an empty body after trimming is also a usage error.

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Reply to a thread or a comment

--body/--body-file and $EDITOR work the same way as threads send. --as picks answer or comment; left unset, it defaults to answer on question threads and comment on every other thread type. --to <commentId> replies under one existing comment instead of the thread itself — the CLI checks that the comment actually belongs to the thread you named before posting, and refuses with a usage error if it doesn’t, since Ed itself would otherwise accept a reply to a comment ID from a different thread while you thought you were replying to this one.

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Review before sending

Every mutation prints a one-line summary and, on --dry-run, also prints the exact content that would be sent to stderr, so a conversion mismatch doesn’t surprise you. --dry-run never calls Ed.

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Markdown to Ed’s document format

The body you write is Markdown; Ed stores posts in its own document format, and the CLI converts one to the other before sending. It supports:
  • paragraphs (blank-line-separated blocks)
  • headings (# through ######)
  • fenced code blocks
  • inline code spans
  • bold and italic
  • links, including a link that itself contains bold or italic text
  • bullet lists (-) and numbered lists (1.)
It does not support tables, blockquotes, images, or nested lists — write those directly against Ed if you need them. Lines without a blank line between them are joined into a single paragraph, the same way Markdown normally treats a soft line break, so put a blank line between anything you want as separate paragraphs. Reading in the other direction — threads read, replies shown inline, lessons read, slides read — converts Ed’s document format back to Markdown; see Threads.

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Writes are never retried

A failed read is retried automatically with backoff; see Ed Discussion CLI for scripts and agents. A failed write is not, because retrying a post or a reply risks creating it twice. If a mutation fails partway, check Ed before running the command again.

Command reference: threads

Full syntax for threads send.