> For the rest, it seems that vi and emacs do what would be needed, and work on everything. Why not just improve on those two products instead of making new ones that are simply short lived fads?

While I get why new editors pop up, and really, I'm glad we have people trying to innovate and introduce new ideas, I'm ultimately more interested in stuff like the Neovim project, for this reason.

I will say it's nice when someone creates a new product that has a killer feature or two, because some form of that seems to make it's way back to vim/emacs pretty often.

> Why not just improve on those two products instead of making new ones that are simply short lived fads?

I'm sure people said the same thing about vi/emacs when they came out.

I think that those two did things that you could not have hacked into their predecessors without esentially making a whole new editor, so you may as well go ahead and write a whole new editor.

OTOH I don't know if that's the case for vim, which is what people seem to mean these days when they talk about vi.

vim is not vi. vi is actually quite painful to use, especially when you're well versed in vim. when there are almost no features in your editor, those modes are not all that helpful. it's also a fraction of the codebase of vim

vim also has a pretty horrible codebase. horrible not because bad developers are working on it. horrible because of historical reasons. but neovim is actually in the process of doing what everyone said nobody could do.

He specifically said: "...if that's the case for vim, which is what people seem to mean these days when they talk about vi"

He didn't say it was vim. You took it as your opportunity to express your Opinion, since he mentioned something you care about, but just look like the kid in class raising his hand as high as he can yelling "Me! Me! Pick me!".

Pay attention.