That is a powerful moat. Vi users or Emacs users may die out at one point in time but they are unlikely to switch in larger numbers.

It is worth noting that while the terminal (for layout see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomberg_Terminal) is a moat there are other reasons it is hard to attack them (Fortune: "Can the Bloomberg terminal be toppled" http://fortune.com/2014/03/20/can-the-bloomberg-terminal-be-... .

While a moat makes it hard to attack it is not always the case that a moat is worth attacking. Just because the target seems weak makes it not valuable. Bloomberg is a private company so numbers are hard to get. What is obvious is that financial services consolidation, the movement to index investment and automated trading makes terminals not a growth market.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/10/business/dealbook/the-blo... > All service providers for Wall Street, not just Bloomberg, are unusually vulnerable at the moment. The financial industry is in the middle of an aggressive run of cost-cutting as it grapples with new regulations and changes in the markets. A Bloomberg contract, which can be upward of $100 million at larger institutions, is a tempting target to whittle down.

> The number of Bloomberg terminals grew only 1.9 percent, to 325,000, last year. In the 10 years before the financial crisis, the number of terminals grew at an average rate of 12 percent each year, with most companies signing on for multiyear contracts.

There may be some demand for cheaper terminals but whether this amounts to enough to build out the expensive data collection organization is far from clear. As may have pointed out quality matters. Opportunities may become larger iff Bloomberg has to cut cost and quality decreases.

I have gone from Textmate to Sublime to Atom and finally took the time to properly learn vi. vi has made my typing so vastly more efficient that I can't imagine to ever use anything else again.

I guess you have never really used vi to make such a comparison, same as op has probably never used the Bloomberg Terminal.

Do you think that using a vim key binding extension like those that are available in most modern editors would have the same effect? Or is part of the magic of vim being forced to use the key bindings?

It's definitely important to force yourself to use the bindings when you're trying to learn them. Also, the Vim bindings in a lot of other editors have subtle issues and/or missing features that make them a pain to use if you're used to using the full range of commands in real Vim.

Do you feel that way about generic text or code in particular? I haven't seen Intellisense or project templating for, say, F# at the same level as a VS Code.

Does this exist? I'd love to move more to Vim!

Well, except vscode is behind vs for F#. Try using a type provider on vscode, it runs like crap for anything non trivial.

Oh, maybe something like Js then? I just pulled the first language I thought of!

We keep creating more vimpires every day. We will outlive GUI editor users by centuries.

What gives me real hope is the insertion of vim modes into GUI editors. It lets me use languages that need IDE assistance to be practical (I'm looking at you, Scala), while still holding on to the Old Ways.

Along those lines, I'm really excited about Neovim's work to make the editor embeddable. Rather than reimplenting a fraction of Vim/Neovim, you can embed all of it.

Have you looked at https://github.com/ensime/ensime-vim ?

Neither the github page or the website say what it is.

Vim is an amazingly good concept, but the actual implementations completely lack a decent user experience. Like, when you do clearly-suboptimal key combinations (like going past a 4-line paragraph by hitting j 4 times instead of just pressing } once),there should be some side-window suggesting better practices. To be fair, Kakoune does that, but there's still a lot of low-hanging fruit like that.

This particular example makes assumptions: that hitting j four times is worse than entering } once.

This depends on typist and keyboard; I use Swedish/Finnish keyboard and touch-type, and hitting j four times happens without looking or thinking. Hitting } requires me to lift my right hand from typing position, hold Alt-Gr, press 0, and then go back to typing position.

Every major programming language uses english keyboard. I'm a starter amateur coder but first thing I did was learn the en-us keyboard layout. There are options to use Alt-Gr accented letters for spanish which I use but also for combining letters which should work for finnish/swedish.

Programming languages don't use keyboards; they use some sets of characters, typically a subset of ASCII. Keyboards then can produce those characters.

And yes, typing [\]{|} and so on is inconvenient on my keyboard. I particularly detest the choice of \ over / in MSDOS and Windows path names.

I occasionally use US keyboard layout just to get around these difficulties, but whenever I arrive at some random computer, it will have the local layout.

(This is particularly confusing when going to France or Germany with they AZERTY and QWERTZ keyboards.)

4j takes half the keystrokes of jjjj, no matter which keyboard layout you're using :)

Yes, but j is where my right index finger sits in the basic typing position, so hitting j four times is still better...

Does Vim not have alternate mappings for other keyboard layouts?

There's at least one remapping to make it dvorak friendly.

I've used vim for years with Dvorak and no remapping. Works great, IMO.

Oh, I'm using it that way, too. (Just don't tell anyone I'm not using hjkl for navigating; my Kinesis Advantage keyboard has cursor keys in sensible locations.)

But there's at least one attempt at a nice remapping for dvorak.

This makes no sense. Vi emulators get into all kinds of text editors and IDEs for a reason, not the other way round. I haven't used a Dvorak keyboard so I don't know anything about that (though many sources seem to suggest its effect is debatable), but on Vi/Vim your comment couldn't be more wrong.