I doubt many "hard-core cli enthusiasts" desire some sort of digital self flagellation, but instead strive for efficiency. Full screen editors are efficient, an

I doubt many "hard-core cli enthusiasts" desire some sort of digital self flagellation, but instead strive for efficiency. Full screen editors are efficient, and was very quickly adopted when made available. Line editors prevailed for a long time, not because of user preferences but because they were tiny and was shipped by default. In PC-DOS/MS-DOS edlin.com/exe was what was available until the full screen editor edit.exe shipped some years into the 90s. Almost all home computers came with a variant of BASIC in ROM, which also used line editing (not even with a proper editor but by substitution of whole lines).