This morning I find myself (re?)reading the documentation on the command language for the Sam editor from Plan9: http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/sam_lang_tutorial/sam_tut.pdf It's interesting to think of these command languages from the 70's as a necessarily linguistic way to describe gestural operations, purely because of the technical limitations of the time. For example, I think editors with multiple cursors may find something to crib from Sam.

For sure. I think it's not just about wanting gestures, though. The letter you posted recently laid it out: terminal and host were still separate, and they wanted the language to provide "direct help with large or repetitive editing tasks." Multiple cursors let you see what's going for interactive editing tasks, but extending them to batch operations is messy in comparison. Like, vim supports a lot of the same commands and range operations as Sam, but the way you use them for batch editing is essentially replaying your keypresses over and over, which introduces edge conditions that don't exist in Sam's language.