That's true. If you tried Control-H, you'd get a lead. Unless of course that was mapped to your main backspace key, which sometime happened in the bad old day

That's true. If you tried Control-H, you'd get a lead. Unless of course that was mapped to your main backspace key, which sometime happened in the bad old days. As to why Control-C doesn't just exit the editor, I suppose it was generally considered to be a bad idea. And in the case of emacs, it might take five or ten minutes to restart. :-) (It's worth noting also that GNU emacs ran on many platforms, some of which for which Control-C was not any kind of "kill my process" character.)