I've done the same from a raspberry pi to a receipt printer, just piping to lp0

TextEdit.app supports printing, so does Notepad.exe (unless they removed that recently).

vim/nvim at least have :print

I think back in the days before office workers that happened to do their work on a computer had access to the ancient relatives of "Microsoft Word"/"Libreoffice Writer", it was pretty normal for printers to take care of plain text files, with about as much fidelity as manual operation of a classic purely mechanical Typewriter.

Since then printers progressively forgot how to cope with such "documents", though IIRC good-old HP "PCL" should only require about a bare minimum of framing/job control to get a modern printer to handle ASCII plain text.

> printing has never really been a thing from text editors I think.

It's always been a thing: We programmed on paper before we had screen editors, and so early screen editors have always had a way to murder trees on demand:

In vi it's :ha

In emacs it's M-x print-buffer

> It has been a while since I printed a plain text file, but I guess there's still a similar command available with some research.

`lp myfile.txt`

I still prefer using hardcopy for reading/debugging.

> printing has never really been a thing from text editors I think.

there's literally ctrl+p shortcut for printing

I used to print a lot of code from Geany, that has some nice support for printing line numbers and code highlights that I have a hard time replicating in other tools.

Fairly sure you can netcat asci on port 9100 to HP Jet Direct printers still.

And of course it just renders an HTML document (applies some CSS to the text content) and then uses the embedded browser's printing.