The values of Emacs, the Neovim revolution, and the VSCode gorilla
On the discussion of values, I&#x27;d also like to submit &quot;(expected) longevity&quot; for consideration, which I think is distinct from &quot;stability&quot;.<p>I made the switch from Vim to Neovim as soon as I felt confident that (1) the project was going to be around for a while, and (2) it was on track to &quot;overtake&quot; Vim (you may choose to disagree with me on this, I found built-in LSP to be a compelling selling point, but the specifics aren&#x27;t really related to the point I&#x27;m trying to make). That it was almost completely a drop-in replacement, down to the init file, certainly didn&#x27;t hurt.<p>Under the author&#x27;s framework, Neovim apparently prefers &quot;progressiveness&quot; while Vim prefers &quot;stability&quot;, and those two sound dimetrically at odds based on their descriptions; but both have large, active communities that aren&#x27;t going anywhere. I&#x27;m not sure I can say the same about Kakoune, for example, which is a certainly a promising project but hasn&#x27;t yet convinced me to jump the fence.<p>[edit for Emacs thoughts]: Now that I think about it, &quot;text centrism&quot; in my mind is also closely related to longevity. I don&#x27;t care as much about the properties of plain text as I do about the fact that I&#x27;ll be able to open&#x2F;view&#x2F;edit them _even if the application ecosystem dies_. I find Emacs attractive here with org-mode and, to a lesser extent, org-roam (the comparison here would be between e.g. SaaS productivity offerings like Notion).