I wonder what of the things you use in the day to day you analyze so deeply, your microwave ? The forks you buy?
Might be an interesting exercise of thought but for something that I use to make money, I will use the best tool available for the job, thank you very much.
> I will use the best tool available for the job
The article is pointing out that the way you decide which tool is best depends on values that you have, which is certainly true whether or not you consciously think about or recognize those values.
Describe your decision process for selecting the best tool in a given scenario, and the values you use should become clear.
I could have saved a few dollars by getting those really cheap forks you see that are obviously just stamped out of sheets of steel, but cheapness wasn't one of my values. Instead I got forks that have never bent, or rusted, or tarnished, or shown any signs of wear in almost a decade of use. Plus they feel nice in the hand, they look good, and they don't have flowers or birds carved into the handle or any of that nonsense. It was also a nice bonus that I found them at a Target a mile from where I live. I hate shopping, so that satisfied a tertiary value by not making me visit a lot of stores.
It's the same with editors. Most people value price above all else, so there's no business in selling editors any more. Back in the day I used a rather nice commercial editor called VEdit. My Dad must have bought it, because at that age I never would have. It had a ton of features, and came with an inch-thick printed manual. I don't recall how extensible or introspectable it was (I was 12 at the time, and didn't care about such things), so probably it wouldn't satisfy my values today. On the other hand, it satisfied (or cultivated) values that I didn't even know at the time that I had. When I discovered VEdit's hex-editor, I started using it on everything. I explored how file names were stored in directory entries. I hex-edited some games to change their messages. I learned quite a lot from those sorts of things, so I'd say that it was money well spent.
But you're correct in saying that editors are not alive, and cannot themselves have values. However, the people who develop the editor certainly do have values, and those values affect the choices they make when they write code. If those values are similar to your own values, then the developers of the editor will make similar choices to the ones you would have made if you had been developing the editor. Thus, the editor will fit you well.