I think comparing it to emacs is kind of missing the point; Oni is primarily targeting two groups of users: long time vim users who want to spend less time configuring plugins and who want some of the modern features that newer IDEs provide; and users of said IDEs who want to experiment with vim but find the learning curve to be a little too steep.

> Emacs has several snippet/templating options, and of course it also has several autocomplete options.

So does vanilla vim, and you can script vim or emacs to do _anything_, but not everybody wants to put that kind of effort into extending their text editor.

> Emacs has had a X GUI for about 25 years (and of course vim has had various GUIs, too — although I think less powerful & extensible).

That's true, and those are great bits of kit, but there's always room for something new, right? :)

> Rather than using Electron and JavaScript and Vimscript and an ancient C core...

Oni is built on top of neovim, which is a modern C core and very nice from what I've heard. :) Also, I don't think Oni would be as far along as it is today if the creator had used native languages and frameworks; at least it wouldn't be available on my mac because IIRC he is primarily a windows user. :D