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:-)

> But RPED? I only ever saw that on Amstrad PC1512/1640 MS-DOS disks.

In the days of EDLIN, "Roland Perry's EDitor" was just a better alternative.

But it wasn't limited to DOS. RPED also came preloaded on Amstrad CP/M Plus, that is, the CP/M 3.0 boot disks that came with every Amstrad PCW and, although I never had them myself, I believe also on floppy-drive-equipped Amstrad CPC and Spectrum +3 machines.

While on DOS Plus or MS-DOS 3.x, RPED was merely better than Edlin, on CP/M it was your only option. There was no bundled text editor in CP/M (AFAICR!) and so if you needed a .SUB file or a startup profile, it was RPED or nothing.

There were many alternatives out there, but you had to buy floppies with them on -- 3" disks, of course, while old CP/M machines used 8" and later ones 5¼" ones. Nothing else ran CP/M and used 3" disks, so no American shareware library could help you. Most of us didn't have a modem and so couldn't download anything, and in any case, the PCW didn't have a serial port as standard.

It was a different world back then. Then, in the 1990s and 2000s, everything came with an editor and they all used the same UI, from TextEdit on Mac OS X to Notepad on Windows to Kate or Gedit or any other Linux desktop's editor.

But still the Vi and Emacs people plow their lonely furrows of horrible (one could even say VILE) user interfaces from before this stuff was standardised. "Vim is editing at the speed of thought" my backside: I don't think in modes and I don't want an editor that has modes either.

Emacs *could* be modernised, but they'd probably have to fire Richard Stallman first.

Fire him again, I mean.