Messy and simple are orthogonal characteristics. A terminal is simple in that cursor movement, colors and style are all the result of a bunch of escape sequence

Messy and simple are orthogonal characteristics. A terminal is simple in that cursor movement, colors and style are all the result of a bunch of escape sequences. Once you have a list of the escape sequences you want to parse or emit, implementing a terminal or an application targeting the terminal is not hard. It's messy because there are historically a bunch of different terminals that implement different escape sequences. It's not easy and it's not clean and beautiful, but it's still simple. It's a bit weird to bring up scripting languages. The problem is that people want a customizable and scriptable editor. Solving that problem by providing a script language to its users is not overengineering, it's simply meeting a demand. Looking at this, it uses some native facilities simply to setup a web browser view. Within that, it doesn't even use the built-in functionality of a browser to render the text you're editing, but resorts to custom rendering and layout using webgl. This isn't simple or clean. It's a convoluted waste of resources in that regard. Why not use one of the smaller cross-platform OpenGL wrappers? Maybe it'll be a fine editor, but it's much more complex than it needs to be. I guess that because they set a "Web-compatible build artifact" as a goal on the roadmap, it makes sense, but is that really an interesting goal? What problems will be solved once the editor is a tab in Chrome?