Vi and vim were never products sold for a profit.
Who was saying what? And what were they saying?
EDIT: ah I think I understand now.
The thing is, I don’t see any advantage to having AI built into the editor vs having a plug-in. Aider.vim is pretty great, for example.
The only reason to have a dedicated editor is a retention/lock in tactic.
The editor handles the human to text file interface, handling key inputs, rendering, managing LSPs, providing hooks to plugins, etc. AI coding assistants kind of sits next to sits it just handles generating text.
It’s why many of these editors just fork vscode. All the hard work is already done, they just add lock in as far as I can tell.
Again, zed is an exception in this pack bc of its CRDT and cooperative features. Those are not things you can easily add on to an existing editor.
Vim has been around since the Stone Age.
Jokes aside, I don’t really see why ai tools need new editors vs plugins EXCEPT that they don’t want to have to compete with Microsoft’s first party AI offerings in vscode.
It’s just a strategy for lock-in.
An exception may be like zed, which provides a lot of features besides AI integration which require a new editor.