You can use both Emacs and vim in this "judicious use of plugins" style, and there's such an abundance of starter kits and battle tested configurations that the

You can use both Emacs and vim in this "judicious use of plugins" style, and there's such an abundance of starter kits and battle tested configurations that the default of either is nothing you need to spend hours configuring your way out of.... There's a reason why these tools are so long lasting, and both absorb every new feature displayed by new editors. TextMate is clearly surpassed by Sublime, even though you could feasibly mod it to adopt those features which make ST2 better. Emacs (and possibly Vim) could also implement any feature you could reasonably expect from a text editor, and in many cases it already has them, you maybe just don't know. But this is 2013, and you're not alone, people all around the world are improving Emacs all the time, and have been for 30 years+ ... you don't HAVE to do all the work, you can just use it. As the man says, Emacs and Vim will be here long after John Skinner has got tired of ST2 and quits developing it.