printing has never really been a thing from text editors I think.

It's always been a thing: We programmed on paper before we had screen editors, and so early screen editors have always had a way to murder trees on demand:

In vi it's :ha

In emacs it's M-x print-buffer

It has been a while since I printed a plain text file, but I guess there's still a similar command available with some research.

`lp myfile.txt`

I still prefer using hardcopy for reading/debugging.