OK, good point.

But isn't writing a text editor one of those garden path problems - a near never ending amount of work to get to just what exists already? I guess I also wonder what inspires developers to start new text editor projects too! Perhaps its just dis-satisfaction with what is there already.

There's a reason you have to be convinced to learn emacs or vi, the user experience is horrible until after you've finished climbing a learning cliff. They work differently than just about every other text editor in the world because they're so old that they don't by default use modern hotkeys people are accustomed to.

Any debate about them being better really misses the point, it's the dvorak querty argument all over. Better doesn't matter as much as familiar to new users. Textmate is immediately useful to a new user and feels like a modern editor. Emacs and vi look and feel archaic and require too much effort to feel productive in.

That's my two cents anyway after many attempts to use both. Can't stand vi, can get by with emacs just don't really dig it. For quick editing in a shell I just use nano because it's usually just editing of config files.

I call ad hominem on the age attacks.

Comparing how emacs and vi/vim are different from other editors and like saying no one will ever use lisp because of all the parentheses.

Hate to tell you, but virtually no one does use Lisp. It's not ad hominem, it's just the facts; I'm not saying it's right or that's how things should be judged, just that they are.

Hate to tell you, but virtually no one does use Lisp. It's not ad hominem, it's just the facts; I'm not saying it's right or that's how things should be judged, just that they are.

Actually, I hate editing any code outside of Vi nowadays. I've gotten used to 'cb', 'dat', etc. I've been using Vi heavily for about ten months.