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>Text editing is a solved problem.

I have this sentence so much.

Ken Thompson wrote UNIX using a line-editor (QED), judging by his work does it mean text editing was already solved in the 60s?

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The interface of text editors has not substantially changed since the time of interactive editors like VIM and emacs. Line editing is an entirely different paradigm. If you are actually going to change the paradigm with which we edit text away from the grid of characters and cursor approach, then by all means, go ahead and write your own. But if you're just making yet another text input pane, then vim and emacs have that problem solved.

You are talking about vim AND emacs but they have completely different approaches, I wouldn't call that solved?

If instead of general text editing we talk about specialized editors (for example emacs for lisp or powerful IDES) they're gonna beat vim or emacs any day (vim is never going to be better than emacs at writing lisp).

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