I do academic research on code editors.
Even though my current work is all Vue and Angular, with a backend that's little more than a REST facade for MongoDB, I still find Coda to be the best development environment available, and I continue to use it all day every day. Considering how strongly Coda was originally tied to the then-dominant LAMP stack, I think that's a pretty strong testament to the product. (Or perhaps just a testament to my stubbornness.)
I won't buy the next version of Coda sight unseen, but it's hard to imagine what Panic might do that would keep them separated from my money.
But I think they were going for hackability = other people will be more likely to develop plugins. The lower barrier to entry is basically one of the major upsides of Atom/VSCode: their plugins tend to have cutting edge support.
For example, iirc Atom was the first to have a good plugin for Elm lang (elm-jitsu). Meanwhile the Elm plugin for Jetbrains' IntelliJ came later as the result of the effort of two Microsoft employees spending billable time on the somewhat academic project.
A better example is that the creator of elmx ("JSX for Elm") was able to create an Atom plugin for their basically experimental library: https://github.com/pzavolinsky/elmx#atom-integration
I also think this differs from "hackability" when used with Vim/Emacs which does mean "you will be hacking together your .*rc file" which is definitely not how I'd characterize VSCode/Atom.
"Newest and greatest" can be achieved so easily, not sure what you're complaining about.
The real strong point is it has strong community of plugins to fill your use case which Coda is missing.
There is room for innovation in the rest of the web dev workflow, which has gotten a bit weird since almost everything involves a compilation step now. Not sure how this could be achieved, but I guess that's why I'm not the one doing it!
It may be hard to sustain it in the long run, but they both changed the landscape at the time.
Also, Sublime was Windows only at first IIRC, so I don’t think it was an answer to TextMate.
Unless you mean the "blog post headline" cake, in that case you might be right.
But, I think the bar has been raised since those days.
Sublime's been Jon's fulltime work for a decade, and has probably 20,000+ hours of work on the core editor, at least an order of magnitude more work put into its extensions, and certainly millions of hours of real-world use and bug reporting.
That's kind of the minimum bar that newcomers need to approach or exceed just to get into the game in 2019.
Unless they are bringing something totally different to the table. For example, Atom's Electron base has drawbacks but it brought a new level (or at least a new kind of) hackability to the game.
In Sublime and Textmate's case, they too brought something unique to the game. While lacking the raw power and configurability and pedigree of vim and emacs, they brought something of that mentality to the world of GUI text editors. And their minimal GUIs allowed them to be flexible and powerful in ways that full-blown GUI monstrosities like Eclipse could not be.
1. JSX <> Object convert
2. CSS <> Object convert
I don’t use a ton of plugins, but there are about 12 that really make my life far easier. That’s probably the same for everyone, but a different set of 5-20 plugins.
That, and the fact that Intellisense/Typescript features are about all that matters in terms of future productivity gain, and I can’t imagine why they’d choose to make this. By the time they release it they’ll be that much further behind the status quo in VSCode, which is far ahead and moving fast. Best of luck to them!
Hopefully it also has good PostgreSQL support and plugins / module support for languages / DSLs such as puppet, SQL, ruby etc... and decent git / GitLab integration.
I focus on the usability of dev tools, including features for navigation, refactoring, testing, and code reviewing. For example, a big part of my dissertation was Patchworks [1], which provides a never-ending carousel of code documents as an alternative to the traditional tab document-based editor.