There's a lot of engineering in Vim as well. E.g., Vim's completion system is actually real cool once you learn it (it "clicked" for me after watching this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TX3kV3TICU ). Vim regex, folding, and spellcheck also have useful features that you won't find anywhere else.
More generally, I agree with you. If it were up to me I would prefer to use Emacs as a baseline. But it's not up to me, just like it wasn't up to Google to decide that Javascript wins. Ubiquity wins. Emacs lost.
> for throwing everything and the kitchen sink into our editor. ... But with vim & neovim, people are building a complex operating environment
That's not really true. The explicit goal of Nvim is to be embedded and focus on "peer to peer" nvim instances. That's the opposite of Emacs' constant reminder that there needs to be a single Emacs daemon controlling everything, and you "should never leave Emacs".
> More generally, I agree with you. If it were up to me I would prefer to use Emacs as a baseline. But it's not up to me, just like it wasn't up to Google to decide that Javascript wins. Ubiquity wins. Emacs lost.
I don't think one can really say 'emacs lost'; the game's not over yet. Yes, emacs really has lost popularity over the last decade, and yes vi really has maintained its popularity. But emacs still exists, new users are still coming to it — and at the end of the day, emacs is a better operating environment than vi. They are both pseudo-Turing-equivalent, in the sense that emacs can perfectly emulate vi & vi can perfectly emulate emacs — but emacs is extensible in a far better language than (vi)|(vim)|(neovim).
I maintain hope that as young programmers become old programmers, they will see the wisdom of true native apps (unlike Sublime), of free software (unlike TextMate) and that when they evaluate emacs vs. vi they will choose an editor they can use & extend for the rest of their lives.
More generally, I agree with you. If it were up to me I would prefer to use Emacs as a baseline. But it's not up to me, just like it wasn't up to Google to decide that Javascript wins. Ubiquity wins. Emacs lost.
> for throwing everything and the kitchen sink into our editor. ... But with vim & neovim, people are building a complex operating environment
That's not really true. The explicit goal of Nvim is to be embedded and focus on "peer to peer" nvim instances. That's the opposite of Emacs' constant reminder that there needs to be a single Emacs daemon controlling everything, and you "should never leave Emacs".