> Programmers do not like to pay for their tooling. Programmers definitely don't want to pay for tooling they haven't used yet. Of course, once they have found

> Programmers do not like to pay for their tooling. Programmers definitely don't want to pay for tooling they haven't used yet. Of course, once they have found a free way to use a tool, they aren't likely to go back and pay for what they already have. One of the biggest things that turns programmers away from tooling is UI/UX. Every programmer is particular about the way they interface with their tooling. The less familiar a tool is, the steeper its learning curve. The more simplified a tool is, the less powerful its abstractions are. UI/UX norms for tooling need to be rethought. Trying to make a tool appeal to a wider audience of programmers is extremely difficult because every tool has baked-in assumptions about how it will be used. Ubiquitously popular tooling tends to be extremely configurable and extremely malleable. The more control the user has over a tool, the more useful it will be to them, and the more interested they will be in using it. There's a reason the shell hasn't died yet. Even with a long list of gotchas and decades of cruft, shells allow users to personalize them to an attractive extreme. The same goes for Vim/Emacs.