I agree. Ken Thompson put it like this: > I don't want to see the state of the file when I'm editing. In my case at least this is mainly the case for quick ed

I agree. Ken Thompson put it like this: > I don't want to see the state of the file when I'm editing. In my case at least this is mainly the case for quick edit, though he probably felt this way in general. A full account by George Coulouris about em, a visual enhancement of ed, is more enlightening: > 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". [1] http://web.archive.org/web/20080103071208/http://www.dcs.qmul.ac.uk/~george/history/ http://web.archive.org/web/20080103071208/http://www.dcs.qmu...