Exactly. The post above yours is simply an illustration of survivorship bias.

I'd be interested to hear about former mainstream editors from that time that are gone. Especially cross platform and Open Source ones :)

Brief, Multiedit, Codewright, Semware, Slickedit and Epsilon used to keep the lights on at many programming/tech magazines. You don't hear much about them anymore...

Clark Maurer still updates Slickedit at least annually though.

You made me curious as I'd never heard of any of these editors... (except for Slickedit, I think)

A bit of digging around:

Brief seems completely dead, was killed off by Borland.

Multiedit seems operational: http://multieditsoftware.com/ It doesn't seem to active, but you can still buy the product.

Semware is still technically "alive": http://www.semware.com/ It was last updated in 2005, so there's that :)

Slickedit: is definitely operational: https://www.slickedit.com/ I have no idea why you're counting it as dead?

Epsilon: seems operational http://www.lugaru.com/ They even had a release in 2018.

To also clarify my previous statement, in the history of software, there's pre-mass PC and pre-internet. In my opinion the 2 periods are not comparable. Anything which was launched before 1995-9 or so is way more likely to have died. The mass PC and the internet have offered even commercial products much higher resilience.

Now, if a tool for developers reaches the mainstream, it super likely to stick.

I find very often that arguments by Emacs and Vim users come from a time before 1999 or so, when companies were super volatile. Look at this: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/08/01/rick-chapman-is-in...

The list from Softletter in the spolsky link kind of illustrated my point. Most of the editors I listed were big sellers until 1997 or so. And most of them are effectively dead with the exception of Slickedit. The reason I switched to vim was the lack of a decent text mode editor for Windows in the early 90s. I'd likely still be using Slickedit otherwise.

Also, the cited survivors have certain characteristics, like being small items with no "ecosystem" baggage and few dependencies in general.