line editor - technical definition

An outmoded editing program that allowed text to be created and changed one line at a time. Edlin was a line editor included with earlier versions of DOS, and ed was the original Unix line editor.

Line editors were the first text editing programs ever written because they were simple to program. Dealing with a fixed line of characters requires less program logic and programming skill than handling a variable stream of text that can be continuously expanded and compressed by the user.