I used to write programs using TECO, a character oriented editor, while at grad school around 1975. I used "dumb" CRT based terminals and occasionally fan-fold paper terminals with TECO. TECO was quite powerful and had a macro system that allowed macros to be enter and employed to perform edits on the underlying file. Like vim-golf, it was possible with a few commands to do things like reverse the order of the lines of a file.

The computer connected to the terminals treated CRT and paper based terminals in the same manner and wrote characters one by one; a line feed caused the paper or the 24 lines displayed on the CRT to scroll up a line.

Because the terminals operated no faster than 30 characters per second (300 baud) it was most practical to keep a few lines of code in one's head while entering a sequence of editing instructions and only ever so often have the editor "print" a few lines in the region one was working on the screen to see how things were going.

Even though this sounds quite primitive and painful, it was a big improvement over using a keypunch machine to program on punch cards.