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?
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.
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 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
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.
Editor holy wars [0] are not exactly new eh
[0] https://www.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de/~joern/jargon/holywars....
Based upon momentum Nicky Minaj is better than John Coltrane. So there's that.
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!
Today those same engineers still use emacs or vi.
Did I miss something?
That Eclipse is now pretty much gone only strengthens that position.