In the early days, there was no such thing as an editor. Punch cards were used for every separate line of code. And along came editors. I had no familiarity with mainframe editors, but DEC systems had EDT/TPU (and another macro scripting thing I forget the name of). Enter 1980s with UNIX. This gave us ed/ex/vi/emacs. I entered the workforce in 1985, and had to edit files on a 1MB memory 68010 system. Emacs was such a memory hog that it would not run on said UNIX system. Fast-forward 15ish years: I have watched seasoned developers spend 2x-3x the time to perform simple editing actions in emacs than it takes to do in vi. Personally, I now have muscle memory for vi/vim, but if I need to edit a binary file, emacs or a hexeditor is the only way to go. IDEs add another level of context & capabilities to editors, as they typically understand the syntax of the language in question and often offer hints.