&gt;  So, there really was no trade off for the power vi and emacs offered (less powerful alternatives of the time were still just as inaccessible), where now there is.<p>There&#x27;s simply nothing out there as good as emacs. Nothing.  Eclipse, IntelliJ, Atom, SublimeText, all those pale in comparison.  vim has its positive points (it&#x27;s an excellent way for a human to edit line-oriented text), but ultimately it too falls down in the general case.  emacs is simply the best way for a human being to use a computer to edit data.<p>There <i>still</i> isn&#x27;t an alternative to vim and emacs.  I kinda wish there were, but there ain&#x27;t.  Someday I&#x27;d like to use a modern emacs-like editor, implemented in Common Lisp (or a successor language), but right now emacs is the pinnacle of editor evolution.