[tom_]

But I don't especially want to switch text editor every 5 years!

Besides, the clock starts ticking from day 1, so if you want the full lifespan then you'll need to start using it while it's still half-baked and buggy and has no ecosystem to speak of. And that means you'll spend a lot of time using it when the goal of "better than what's currently available" remains firmly unrealized (for all that it may have some key item of interest that's caught your attention). Or you could start using it later, once things are properly going, and then I'd expect your experience would be a bit more like mine, before I finally bit the bullet in 2006 or whenever it was and sat down to teach myself how to actually use this Emacs thing, and you'll be finding yourself having to switch after more like 2-3 years.

Still, this is no immutable law of nature, as Visual Studio Code (9 years old) shows. And of course, Emacs and vim themselves - along with a number of other less famous FOSS options - would never have got this far if every editor automatically died off after year 5.

Nevertheless, my bet stands.