Real developers only use cat >> <file> to edit, and start from scratch if they make a mistake.

That's basically edlin

In Plan 9 the terminal has something called "hold mode" which lets you do multi-line editing in that situation.

I guess I'm imaginary then, because I use sed -i to fix mistakes.

I don't know if they're taught these days-- they weren't when I was in school-- but sed & awk are two tools I'd recommend to pretty much everyone.

I remember stumbling on to them in my first job and thinking an very much appreciating their power over having to write a small program to iterate through an arbitrary # of files to do something... and another small program if I wanted to do something slightly different, etc.

If numbers can be imaginary, why not people? Many imaginary numbers are extremely useful, so there's no reason you can't lead a perfectly productive career as an imaginary person.

Or a magnetized needle, or a butterfly...

https://xkcd.com/378/

Wow, it seems I wasn't thinking low-level enough. I'll have to remember that emacs macro. If I ever get around to learning emacs.