> That's something I don't get: why don't they use either? The other way to look at that question is to consider who the developers were back then and what alt

> That's something I don't get: why don't they use either? The other way to look at that question is to consider who the developers were back then and what alternatives they had. Emacs or vi compares very well at first glance to a tool like ed... but maybe not so much when side by side with Eclipse, etc. It's a harder sell these days, and that's only more true when you consider all the language/ecosystem integration you get from a modern IDE. Emacs and vi also tend to be the kinds of tools that reward long-term study and practice. I don't know this for a fact, but I'd guess that with the massive increase in the prevalence of developers over the last 30-40, that it's brought in huge number of people that have little to no interest in learning the vi editing language, Emacs Lisp, etc. > absolute power & extensibility (as with emacs). As a 25 year Emacs user, I question the 'absolute power' bit... there's a lot of magic that's easy out of the box in IntelliJ or Eclipse that's quite difficult in Emacs... Maybe the situation could be different in theory, but it's not right now and many people have many good reasons for focusing on the 'right now'.