When? Oh, 20-odd years ago! Rob Pike's sam editor (http://sam.cat-v.org/ http://sam.cat-v.org/) is architected as two components. One is the graphical front end

When? Oh, 20-odd years ago! Rob Pike's sam editor (http://sam.cat-v.org/ http://sam.cat-v.org/) is architected as two components. One is the graphical front end that typically runs on your local machine, the other implements the actual editing functions and can be run remotely over a shell connection. You can open a huge list of files and perform complex editing operations on them without downloading all the content in to the graphical front end, because the front end only needs the parts of the files that you have displayed in open windows.