For me as an old programmer this question is really weird. The question ought to be why so many new editors don't offer this age old feature. (Together with block/rectangular editing).
Simply put, I want to be able to move around my text in any way, not being restricted to where someone has typed before. The screen represents a rectangular image of a piece of text (think metaphores here etc). I expect to be able to go anywhere within this rectangular space without being stopped by how the underlying file looks.
Example: If we have three lines of text:
Line1: This is a long line with lots of text in it.
Line2: This is a shorter line.
Line3: This is a third line with text.
If I am at the end of line 2 and want to navigate to the end of line 1 I want to be able to go right (a number of times) and then up, which is one way to do it in virtual space, but in the new kind of editors (which behave in a very old file-centric way) if I press right at the end of line 2 I will end up at the beginning of line 3. What's the point of that? Of course that mimics a "step forward" in the file, but metaphorically I wanted to go somewhere else.
I really think this is a quite backwards way to go.
And as an end point - this is symtomatic of many (young?) programmers who haven't seen so many operating systems and editors from before, some of which were not at all worse than todays systems. Linux/Unix is not the world, there were many better systems that we could learn from.
answered 2011-10-27T12:56:13.503