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by brianjlogan 205 days ago
Why are there so many people making code editors?

It seems like we've hit a veritable Cambrian explosion of editors and I don't understand what market signals are being picked up where people find the editors insufficient.

3 comments

Do you consider forking VSCode making a code editor? I wouldn't. Not that this is one of those, but most "new" editors seem to be.
LSP for sure. I was itching to try my hand at it when they first got big, but never got around to it.
Software is changing, everything is up for grabs. Lots of people are making Notion clones, slack clones, browsers, IDEs.
> slack clones

As an anecdote - I really want to see consolidation here. All my chat services under one parent application. WhatsApp, Slack, Discord, Messenger.

I really don't care about the vendor for chat services, just exhausted of installing multiple clients and many of the clients being pretty garbage.

I would also like to say the same for many services. Online banking is top of mind for me right now as I have several bank accounts chasing competitive savings rates.

I'm pretty sure you don't want Teams to be the winner of consolidation. Unfortunately it's for the advantage of being included for free for ever big company using M365. We are fighting a losing battle to keep Slack.
A funny workaround I employed is running Beeper. It's a Matrix client that also provides chat mirroring for other platforms. The sync is slightly jank but it works for what I want to achieve

The mirroring stuff is FOSS and I think so is the client, the financial model being that you're limited to a fairly low amount of services proxies at once without a paid plan

> All my chat services under one parent application. WhatsApp, Slack, Discord, Messenger.

There was a time where one application for multiple chat services was a thing, e.g. Pidgin, Trillian or Miranda. With thw death of ICQ, AIM or MSN this is pretty much history.