[MetaCosm]

Craftsmen and tools. It is an age old story, you grow to trust and understand a tool. Programmers and text editors are an extreme example, because programmers often spend 30+ hours a week using a single too, their editor.

Vim and Emacs have survived because they are "fit for a purpose"... they are really good at editing text! Emacs has a niche in expandability. You can always twist Emacs to do your bidding... and it has a culture of tinkers. Vim has much more of a culture of users, people who want to edit text rather that toy with their editor.

These editors have roots in the 70s and are still kicking -- that isn't some random accident, that is because the fundamental act of editing text hasn't change too much.

[alwillis]

>Vim has much more of a culture of users, people who want to edit text rather that toy with their editor.

I don’t know about that. I really got into Vim because it’s so customizable. The number of general purpose and very specific plugins is pretty amazing.

And the Vim Awesome site that tracks plugins is pretty damn awesome: http://vimawesome.com

[MetaCosm]

Vim has great plugins -- but expanding it is often best left to experts. I have a pet theory that part of the reason for the high quality of many vim plugins is the horrors of writing them (and of course, tpope). Most Vim users are simple, "off the shelf" users -- they use plugins, but they don't WRITE plugins and they often don't radically change the environment (it still feels like vim, as expected). Vim is a good editor that works great with other tools.

Emacs is more -- of its own things -- lots of people write little bits of elisp to do their bidding, and the "plugins" can completely reshape the editor into an IRC client... a mail client... a media player ... a connection to spotify ... etc. It is a wild crazy world powered by elisp.