Why are so many companies hacking on atom recently? First it was MS, and now FB? Anything special about Atom that you don't get in something like Vim or Emacs? They're both open source, and very hackable.
A majority of programmers actually wanting to use it.
While we might use Emacs and Vim in our echo chamber, the huge masses of programmers prefer an IDE or something like TextMate, SublimeText, Notepad++ etc.
But they didn't, my guess is because NIH.
Perhaps but nobody has done it yet.
Emacs and Vim are like Lisp at this point: unicorns. Perfect, mythical creatures everybody loves to talk about. Meanwhile oxen like Eclipse, Visual Studio, Sublime, etc. keep chugging 90% of the world's code :)
I've been waiting for this for literally a decade with emacs. It hasn't happened and I don't have the expertise to do it, so nowadays I exclusively use IntelliJ for the languages I can. I'm probably going to start using CLion with it as well.
There are lots of aspects of Emacs that I miss but I hope that IntelliJ can take them over with future iterations of the vestigial "IDE scripting console". They just need to put a lispy language in there like Clojure and bindings into the editor like Emacs Lisp has.
Oh and also replying to the guy above. Tell that to dozens of OSS tools that had to be supported by real companies because people were not that willing to donate. Look at grsecurity for example, tmux, and the other ones i do not remember that Stripe donated 100k to.
Which gives you the incentive to make the software less user friendly so more people pay for support :)
I work with someone who has gotten me thinking a lot more about what software I do and don't pay for. He pays for any software he uses "daily". The payments are either donations to open source projects, service fees, or software purchases.
Although this would not be much of a change for Sublime in particular, which is commercial with purchase optional (just occasional nagging.)