I think you misunderstand what I am saying. I am absolutely not saying that there is any difference in utility whatsoever. I have watched skilled exponents of

I think you misunderstand what I am saying. I am absolutely not saying that there is any difference in utility whatsoever. I have watched skilled exponents of Vim and Emacs perform wizardry, and I've also seen an adept of Jedit do things with plain English text that I don't know how to do in any editor. This is absolutely not about utility or capabilities. It's about UI. I am aware of efforts to bring a standard modern (as in, 1990s) UI to both editors. For Emacs there is ErgoEmacs -- https://ergoemacs.github.io/ https://ergoemacs.github.io/ -- which is amazing and makes it slightly usable even for me, steeped in CUA for over a third of a century. For Vim I know of Cream -- https://cream.sourceforge.net/ https://cream.sourceforge.net/ -- but it seems unmaintained for a long time and when I tried it I couldn't get it working. What I am saying is two other, quite different things: 1. Using the Linux shell is needlessly hard and complicated, because of its adamant refusal to adopt the modernised UIs of other text-mode OSes from 30+ years ago. These could be bringing the shell into harmony with the GUI, making the experience better, and it would be trivially easy to set things up so that experienced users with their own ways of doing things were not inconvenienced at all. 2. As a result of this refusal, or even of this blank ignorance and lack of curiosity in how other OSes and other platforms modernised text-mode apps, the dominant tools in Linux and other FOSS xNixes have no standadisation. Even when there are TUIs driven by ncurses or whatever, they're all different and all inconsistent. There's no need for it. It's wasting everyone's time. In other words, the tools don't need to be different from one another and they don't need to look and work so differently from in GUI desktops.