Hmm I dunno if I'm a fan of making things painful for students just because it was painful in the past. When I "learnt" assembly in uni we had to manually assemble the opcodes and type them into a 10 digit keypad. I didn't learn anything, it just put me off.

I'm pretty skeptical that using a line editor will have helped them learn. It probably helped them memorise their code but is that really learning? Dubious.