If you're really that concerned about using propriety software why not help build the emacs or vim ecosystem instead?
I would love to contribute but I'm mostly a webdev, but I'd love to take a year or so to learn and hopefully contribute throughout the rest of my life. It's just so hard to start or learn.
The material doesn't even have to be directly related to vim, I'd like to learn more about how and why text editors work and some of the common concerns when building one.
The editor itself is in C; I don't think there's any "learning materials" available for the (Neo)Vim internals specifically, so you just gotta learn C. Overall, it's not that hard IMO: I'm not a very experienced C programmer, and I managed to get some patches into Vim. Neovim also uses Lua in various parts for its internals, but I'm not very familiar with Neovim.
If you want to work on things like language support (syntax files, some completions) then most of that is in VimScript; "Learn VimScript the hard way" is a good place to get started.
Wouldn't an editor ecosystem based on Codium be as open-source as Emacs' and Vim's?
Are you referring to some difference in their specific licenses?
That said, it sounds like people are maintaining an equivalent store for Codium [0], and are populating it with most of the packages found in Microsoft's repo. I'd think addresses most of the concerns about that particular form of moating.
> with some amazing features (like remote editing) or plugins being unavailable
The remote-editing package is definitely a sticking point for me. Is there some reason to believe that an open-source equivalent is out of reach?
I'm speaking from a place of ignorance on this, but I'd expect someone out there to want to do the work of writing that OSS package. Particularly if they preferred Codium over Vim/Emacs for other reasons.
Ha!
:wq