I think the quick answer is that they most certainly didn't. Vim or Emacs are popular and fill most use cases while obviously working in dozens of other languages. For actual text rendering use cases their are plenty of popular libraries such as curses
Emacs kinda allows for that and org mode is sort of a rich text editing, but I'm actually talking about cli word like things. There was a very popular German one whichs name I forgot also, that people were using long into Windows 95/98.
