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>Pragmatically speaking all of the great stuff Raph is talking about doesn't really matter. What Raph cares about are the kind of things people who build text editors like to geek out on and again

Unfortunately that's not true. If only MORE people that build text editors actually DID geek out on such things. Alas, we have 30+ years of editors that got all those wrong.

>Imma let you finish but VSCode and Atom and the entire Electron ecosystem have once again proven that a sub-optimal but powerful platforms with low barriers to entry win most of the time

Well, they don't win with me. But even if so, I don't see why you can't have an optimal platform AND a big ecosystem. Or how json-rpc (which is what the plugins will need to talk to) is a high "barrier to entry".

if the editor is slow its certnly not due to core. but most likely that its parsing 10k files for intellisense. even the most naive implementation of a text editor will be fast.

You named some random things that have been around for short periods of time and claimed that "they won". I don't get it.

Based upon momentum I believe the Electron based ecosystem has already won, yes.

The momentum there eclipses... Eclipse, as well as many other closed and open source editors.

If you don't see the Electron ecosystem as a winner today would you say they'll have won if all editors stay at their current momentum of new features and bug fixes?

How is it that text editors are all the sudden this weird competition where you have to win?

I get what you're saying, but I think you worry too much about social proof and momentum. It's also grossly unfair to Xi, a project in its infancy. As you mentioned earlier, there is room for another great editor. If the same logic had been applied towards the Electron based editors a few years ago, you'd be arguing against them based on 'pragmatism' because Emacs/vim exists.

What I'm trying to say is, people remember when you try to improve on things, even if you don't quite make it. Nobody remembers the guy commenting on a thread shooting it down. Decide which one you want to be.

> How is it that text editors are all the sudden this weird competition where you have to win?

Editor holy wars [0] are not exactly new eh

[0] https://www.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de/~joern/jargon/holywars....

I wouldn't call it "winning" but you do need a big piece of the userbase to be relevant (when we are talking about text editors that are 90% plugins and 10% core, like Atom, Sublime, VsCode, Vim, Emacs...)

When I write code in a language I don't find the best language plugin for language X in "my editor". Instead I search for "which editor has the best plugin for language X". And in most of the cases, the difference between different editors is much smaller than the difference in quality between language plugins.

So basically, unless an editor "wins" (say becomes one of the top 5 most used) then there will be very few plugins for that text editor for the next thing that you need a plugin for.

(And let's hope a non-electron editor is the next to gain that momentum.)

I have a different algorithm: Instead of asking "what editor has the best plugin for X", I just use emacs. If emacs isn't great at X when I start using it for X, it'll be there soon enough.

you picked one that is already in that top. Try that with the 100th most used editor.

I disagree it’s worth sticking to on text editor for programming tasks. The productivity boost of a good complex plugin is huge, way bigger than anything one gets from productivity in the text editing itself that comes from familitarity with the editor I think.

Look at the state of e.g Rust dev in Atom/VSCode/.. today. It will get there but it might be years for the one in spot #3 to reach the #1

Your point exactly? You appear to either switch editors or consider switching on a regular basis, and I don't.

ok :)

My point was that if you want the best plugin (not good enough) then the editor must vary.

And secondly, if you do stick with one editor it’s surely one of those biggest ones as otherwise the chance is slim of even finding half decent plugins.

Hey, you edited your comment to remove what I responded to. Thanks for not labeling the edit.

Probably realized just like you that I misinterpreted or formulated something poorly, sorry.

>Based upon momentum I believe the Electron based ecosystem has already won, yes.

Based upon momentum Nicky Minaj is better than John Coltrane. So there's that.

I think it’s fair enough to say that, from the perspective of community momentum and extension momentum, they’ve “won”, sure. It’s also fair to say that in many cases a user’s text editor doesn’t need quite that breadth of extensibility and/or feature-richness, and that winning that war (or battle) isn’t really all that important to at least some subset of users.

That’s where Xi fits. It’s saying “these things we don’t get from other editors are important”. Users are free to decide which feature or attributes are most important to them. At the end of the day, users win!

What exactly does 'won' mean to you in this context? Other than the fact you're tying it to some vaguely positive notion around momentum, it's not at all obvious what claim you're making.

Here, you can have your cake (electron) and eat it too (xi-core) https://github.com/acheronfail/xi-electron

Never actually seen anyone use Atom, too slow everyone on HN said.

I see a lot of coder chicks on instagram pose with atom & react on their screens. It's become a fashion.

10 years ago Eclipse was most popular editor and was considered the best. Java, C++, PHP. Aptana, IBM IDEs and many more. And now it is pretty much gone.

I really wonder what you are basing this opinion on. The most recent stable release (Oxygen) was released last June, and Eclipse Che, their cloud IDE last October. In Stack Overflow's 2017 Developer 2017, 20% of Web Developers use Eclipse, 25% of Desktop developers use Eclipse, 22% of SysAdmins use Eclipse, and 27% of Data Scientists and Engineers use Eclipse.

10 years ago everyone at my startup used emacs or vi.

Today those same engineers still use emacs or vi.

Did I miss something?

I don't even know any C++ programmers who thought Eclipse was a good editor, let alone the best.

That Eclipse is now pretty much gone only strengthens that position.

There's a reason there are hundreds of text editors and only a handful of remaining general-purpose desktop operating system and only a handful of remaining microprocessor ISAs.

In the 1980s and 1990s the i386 ISA had tremendous velocity, which is why it still exists whereas DEC Alpha does not. In contrast, to the situation with microprocessor ISAs, it is practical to use a text editor without a lot of velocity -- or at least it is practical for me because of the way I use my text editor: basically, I just want something with a clean internal architecture that is as easy for me to learn how to modify as Emacs currently is.

Modifying or customizing vscode has a low barrier to entry only if you already know web technologies. if you do not, then it has a very high barrier to entry compared to most other text editors.

Atom and VS Code definitely haven't won for me. I don't use them, and personally I think they mostly suck. The plugin ecosystem seems to be the only benefit. But I actually need to use my system resources for things, so I'd rather not waste them for some minor conveniences in my editor.

Based on this video, I feel I'll almost certainly be using Xi for most of my editing in the future.

As a long time Atom user I want to agree with you but I'm not sure these editors really have "won".

At least according to HackerRank's "2018 Developer Skills Report"[1] 67% of developers used VIM with only 4% and 2% using VS or Atom.

Stack Overflow in last year's "Developer Survey Results"[2] does align with your opinion however. Sooo... \_(ツ)_/¯

[1] http://research.hackerrank.com/developer-skills/2018/#insigh... [2] https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2017#technology-mo...

In the world of text editors, VSCode sure does seem to outperform Notepad++. I can open larger files with ease and while in those files it feels more responsive.

But for extremely large files, I use EditPad Lite.

Wasn't that long ago people said the same thing with sublime.

What looks nice about Xi is that the next cool editor can be built on top of it and leverage it's stability.