This does a great disservice to the quality and functionality of Sublime.

I was a fluent vim user before switching to Sublime and have never looked back. The smooth (i.e. not line-by-line) scrolling and powerful multi-cursors were enough to draw me. The little things like a beautiful file explorer sidebar with icons-per-filetype, great package manager you can launch, search, and install from right in the editor, and yes, occasionally even the mini-map, all keep me here.

There's a pervasive meme on HN that Sublime took off because of its lesser learning curve, and that if you're a professional programmer you should make the investment to learn vim and emacs. But this ignores that a lot of people who have already made that investment still find Sublime to be a better editor.

While I can understand the importance of using an open source editor, that particular argument doesn't sway me since I'm happy enough using Sublime for now. If it stops getting updates or whatever, I can always switch back to vim, but for now I will use what I feel is the best editor for the job.

If I install emacs it is just okay. It probably has syntax highlighting, depending on the Linux distribution. It probably doesn't have any quality of life improvements for language X. I can drop in a theme and colorize it pretty quickly to my liking. From there, emacs is still very powerful, but there are a lot of things I really love for long and deep editing sessions when I am going through a lot of files on a code review or what not.

As an aside I found the Leo editor not too long ago. http://leoeditor.com/ -- one of the few editors that made me think "that is a little new". Leo is implemented in Python.

I wish there was a modern equivalent of emacs, only all Python. :)

This sounds like the micro text editor. I've committed a few features to it and use it daily:

https://github.com/zyedidia/micro

You might be interested in checking it out.

I run emacs over ssh/tmux. I love it, emacs never shuts down, all my shells run through emacs as well. I can use any machine with my sshkey and be back to work immediately. I can increase the size of the machine, have public access to my dev box if needed. If I have a bad internet connection it doesnt matter since its just sending low bandwidth over ssh. All the real bandwidth comes from DigitalOcean and is super fast.

I would generally agree with your point, especially on the discoverability front - this is why emacs and vim have an often dreaded learning curve. But OTOH, there are also a couple of rather nice benefits to the terminal focus that I don't currently see in more GUI focused editors. It would certainly be doable to replicate them, but it seems like no one's trying currently.

So I would hold off on forgetting about the terminal until there's a viable alternative around.

Oh, and: I've seen my fair share of botched remote access solutions on the Windows side of things and would probably use any TUI editor short of ed over any IDE in those situations. At least SSH is responsive.

I don't believe that. The people who snub Vim and Emacs, but are willing to sink time into learning new editors, new languages, and new frameworks have no excuse. If they were less susceptible to marketing, then they'd be able to learn something old every once in a while.

I'd love to see someone shake up the space with a "modern" take on emacs and vim: native, fast, powerful, very configurable, terminal based, but also with a conscious view on the initial learning curve and out of the box usefulness.

People have been attempting this for years with little success. The only projects I know of that have traction are Spacemacs and Neovim. The former is just an Emacs distribution and the latter is backwards compatible with Vim.

This is still a project in its early stages. The Mac build has basic editing functionality (it was used to write this README), but looks very spare and is still missing essentials such as auto-indent. At the moment, it’s expected that its main community will be developers interested in hacking on a text editor.

* simple and non-tedious to use by default,

* can run via terminal and ssh,

* supports vim themes,

* full support for Language Server Protocol,

---* (Can work with clangd)

* fast and polished