Based upon momentum I believe the Electron based ecosystem has already won, yes.

The momentum there eclipses... Eclipse, as well as many other closed and open source editors.

If you don't see the Electron ecosystem as a winner today would you say they'll have won if all editors stay at their current momentum of new features and bug fixes?

How is it that text editors are all the sudden this weird competition where you have to win?

I get what you're saying, but I think you worry too much about social proof and momentum. It's also grossly unfair to Xi, a project in its infancy. As you mentioned earlier, there is room for another great editor. If the same logic had been applied towards the Electron based editors a few years ago, you'd be arguing against them based on 'pragmatism' because Emacs/vim exists.

What I'm trying to say is, people remember when you try to improve on things, even if you don't quite make it. Nobody remembers the guy commenting on a thread shooting it down. Decide which one you want to be.

> How is it that text editors are all the sudden this weird competition where you have to win?

Editor holy wars [0] are not exactly new eh

[0] https://www.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de/~joern/jargon/holywars....

I wouldn't call it "winning" but you do need a big piece of the userbase to be relevant (when we are talking about text editors that are 90% plugins and 10% core, like Atom, Sublime, VsCode, Vim, Emacs...)

When I write code in a language I don't find the best language plugin for language X in "my editor". Instead I search for "which editor has the best plugin for language X". And in most of the cases, the difference between different editors is much smaller than the difference in quality between language plugins.

So basically, unless an editor "wins" (say becomes one of the top 5 most used) then there will be very few plugins for that text editor for the next thing that you need a plugin for.

(And let's hope a non-electron editor is the next to gain that momentum.)

I have a different algorithm: Instead of asking "what editor has the best plugin for X", I just use emacs. If emacs isn't great at X when I start using it for X, it'll be there soon enough.

you picked one that is already in that top. Try that with the 100th most used editor.

I disagree it’s worth sticking to on text editor for programming tasks. The productivity boost of a good complex plugin is huge, way bigger than anything one gets from productivity in the text editing itself that comes from familitarity with the editor I think.

Look at the state of e.g Rust dev in Atom/VSCode/.. today. It will get there but it might be years for the one in spot #3 to reach the #1

Your point exactly? You appear to either switch editors or consider switching on a regular basis, and I don't.

ok :)

My point was that if you want the best plugin (not good enough) then the editor must vary.

And secondly, if you do stick with one editor it’s surely one of those biggest ones as otherwise the chance is slim of even finding half decent plugins.

Hey, you edited your comment to remove what I responded to. Thanks for not labeling the edit.

Probably realized just like you that I misinterpreted or formulated something poorly, sorry.

>Based upon momentum I believe the Electron based ecosystem has already won, yes.

Based upon momentum Nicky Minaj is better than John Coltrane. So there's that.

I think it’s fair enough to say that, from the perspective of community momentum and extension momentum, they’ve “won”, sure. It’s also fair to say that in many cases a user’s text editor doesn’t need quite that breadth of extensibility and/or feature-richness, and that winning that war (or battle) isn’t really all that important to at least some subset of users.

That’s where Xi fits. It’s saying “these things we don’t get from other editors are important”. Users are free to decide which feature or attributes are most important to them. At the end of the day, users win!

What exactly does 'won' mean to you in this context? Other than the fact you're tying it to some vaguely positive notion around momentum, it's not at all obvious what claim you're making.

Here, you can have your cake (electron) and eat it too (xi-core) https://github.com/acheronfail/xi-electron

Never actually seen anyone use Atom, too slow everyone on HN said.

I see a lot of coder chicks on instagram pose with atom & react on their screens. It's become a fashion.

10 years ago Eclipse was most popular editor and was considered the best. Java, C++, PHP. Aptana, IBM IDEs and many more. And now it is pretty much gone.

I really wonder what you are basing this opinion on. The most recent stable release (Oxygen) was released last June, and Eclipse Che, their cloud IDE last October. In Stack Overflow's 2017 Developer 2017, 20% of Web Developers use Eclipse, 25% of Desktop developers use Eclipse, 22% of SysAdmins use Eclipse, and 27% of Data Scientists and Engineers use Eclipse.

10 years ago everyone at my startup used emacs or vi.

Today those same engineers still use emacs or vi.

Did I miss something?

I don't even know any C++ programmers who thought Eclipse was a good editor, let alone the best.

That Eclipse is now pretty much gone only strengthens that position.