[jacquesm]

I think you have nailed the reason why I work like that: I learned to program in the days of line editors. So it was quite like what you said, only not with a word at the time but a line at the time which is way too little context so you need something to offset that.

[analognoise]

This might be a stupid question, but is there a kind of "modern" line editor, maybe with jump-to functionality, that would only show me one line of code at a time?

I wonder if programming like that would force an improvement in my code: kind of like programming through a keyhole, rather than the information overload of 20 documents open simultaneously.

Maybe an Emacs mode with Intellisense, that only showed a line at a time, with syntax highlighting?

[jacquesm]

Well, you could always set your window to be only one line high, that would have much the same effect.

[reitanqild]

Never used it standalone but I'd think that is what "ed" is?