Well, I think the OP's point is that it would be easier to bring Emacs/VIM up to acceptable GUI editor standards rather than build the whole thing from scratch, as a webapp no less.

But they didn't, my guess is because NIH.

> Well, I think the OP's point is that it would be easier to bring Emacs/VIM up to acceptable GUI editor standards

I've been waiting for this for literally a decade with emacs. It hasn't happened and I don't have the expertise to do it, so nowadays I exclusively use IntelliJ for the languages I can. I'm probably going to start using CLion with it as well.

There are lots of aspects of Emacs that I miss but I hope that IntelliJ can take them over with future iterations of the vestigial "IDE scripting console". They just need to put a lispy language in there like Clojure and bindings into the editor like Emacs Lisp has.

>is that it would be easier to bring Emacs/VIM up to acceptable GUI editor standards

Perhaps but nobody has done it yet.

And it's not for lack of trying. The last major attempt was Sun Studio on the 90's/early 00's.

Emacs and Vim are like Lisp at this point: unicorns. Perfect, mythical creatures everybody loves to talk about. Meanwhile oxen like Eclipse, Visual Studio, Sublime, etc. keep chugging 90% of the world's code :)

Keep in mind, Atom was NIH at Facebook too.

And while bringing Emacs/Vim up to acceptable GUI editor standards might be possible (MacVim does an alright job of this), I'm guessing that a lot of the head Emacs/Vim people would be against it, and wouldn't want to merge it back into mainline. That would leave FB having to maintain their fork of it, and splitting mindshare, etc. Atom doesn't need that much work, and it's easier to maintain a plugin than an entire fork.

If it was NIH, then why did they use the existing Atom editor?