I don't think that's it. I could definitely manage without having a community around my editor. The only packages I have installed in Sublime Text are syntaxes

I don't think that's it. I could definitely manage without having a community around my editor. The only packages I have installed in Sublime Text are syntaxes and colour schemes. Sublime actually supports TextMate syntax for those (.tmLanguage and .tmTheme,) which was a good way to bootstrap a useful editor before it got a community of its own. If you want linters or code intelligence, there's an emerging editor-agnostic solution for that as well. The guys behind the Language Server protocol[1] realized that making an editor plugin for each language in each editor was inefficient and it slows the adoption of new languages and new editors. [1]: https://langserver.org/ https://langserver.org/