TextEditors, Emacs and Vim

I've used quite a few text editors over the years (Bluefish, Scite, Homesite, Phase5, Idle, TextMate, Vim, others). I switched to Emacs more than a year ago with one clear goal: Not having to switch anymore. You see, most of the editors above (except vim) used to be good and then were deprecated, sold, stopped, and so on. Which of those has been existing for more than 20 years and is still able to hold up to new editors. Sadly, none (One could argue for TextMate 2, but in between there were many, many years of staleness).

I was fed up with having to switch to a newfangled editor every so many years, having to identify new plugins, having to learn new keybindings. I've used Vim for 7 years (I think) and it came pretty close, but in the end the archaic VimScript language and the lack of async commands was something that was nagging me. I wanted to call an editor home, and hone my skills until I pass away, increasing my arcane knowledge over 10-20 years, learning ever more about the scripting language, commands, and writing more and more specific plugins that help with my tasks.

I still want to be coding in 10 years, but I don't want to switch text editors ever again. Emacs shall be my final editor ¹, and that's why I decided to switch. Because I can see Emacs still going strong in another 20 years. I wouldn't want to say that about Sublime, or really any other editor right now.

¹ There's a case to be made that NeoVim is going to be great, and it may well be, but right now I'm really, really, really happy with Emacs + Evil. Nothing is perfect, of course, but the things that bug me are really, really small things that I could probably even fix, if I'd invest enough time; but they don't bug me enough for that.