alt Hacker News> By the way, 'em' stands for 'editor for mortals' - I christened it that after Ken Thompson visited our lab at QMC while I was developing it and said something like: "yeah, I've seen 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".
Literally an insane opinion.
To be fair, I sometimes edit files with ed. Especially the ones I've seen hundreds of times (eg /etc/ssh/sshd_config).
Nowadays we're dealing with orders of magnitude more code. Back in the day it would've been fine for the programs you wrote yourself.