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Yeah, you're right! We should have stopped with Emacs in 1976. After all, everything after that point has been pointless and derivative.

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I agree with your point, even though emacs is still my favorite editor

"Ed is the standard text editor." and maybe we didn't "need" anything else, but comfort and ease of use are good incentives to create better tools, and tools more adequate with our work environment.

"I've seen [visual] editors like that, but I don't feel a need for them. I don't want to see the state of the file when I'm editing."

- Ken Thompson on the superiority of ed to editors such as today's vi or emacs, as summarized by Peter Salus in A Quarter Century of UNIX (Addison-Wesley, 1994)

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ken_Thompson

It’s very weird how I can’t imagine editing text without seeing the state

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