the in-between mode that you mention but seem to dismiss it is the way most traditional unixheads work with data most of the time: from the command line editor

the in-between mode that you mention but seem to dismiss it is the way most traditional unixheads work with data most of the time: from the command line editor? when i pull up emacs, 50% of the time it's write emacs macros, and I do that because shell scripts don't easily go backward in the stream. (something rarely mentioned about teco was that it was a stream editor that would chew its way forward through files; you didn't need the memory to keep it all in core, and it could go backward within understandable limits) writing an actual shellscript is only for when it's really hairy, you are going to be repeating it and/or you need the types of error handling that cloud up the clarity of the commandline the commandline does provide rudimentary "records" in the saved history