retrocomputing

Yes. Sometimes terminal emulators or the libraries in use just fail. Plain old print line might still work.

One of the great things of command driven editors like vi, sam, ed, and helix is that they can tolerate massive lag and various kinds of brokenness.

What does kind of offset this is that there's less need these days to try and talk to broken systems. You can often just pull the drive/card or boot from another source and fix the image or something.