"Ed is the standard text editor." and maybe we didn't "need" anything else, but comfort and ease of use are good incentives to create better tools, and tools more adequate with our work environment.
"I've seen [visual] editors like that, but I don't feel a need for them. I don't want to see the state of the file when I'm editing."
- Ken Thompson on the superiority of ed to editors such as today's vi or emacs, as summarized by Peter Salus in A Quarter Century of UNIX (Addison-Wesley, 1994)
- Ken Thompson on the superiority of ed to editors such as today's vi or emacs, as summarized by Peter Salus in A Quarter Century of UNIX (Addison-Wesley, 1994)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ken_Thompson