How is it that text editors are all the sudden this weird competition where you have to win?

I get what you're saying, but I think you worry too much about social proof and momentum. It's also grossly unfair to Xi, a project in its infancy. As you mentioned earlier, there is room for another great editor. If the same logic had been applied towards the Electron based editors a few years ago, you'd be arguing against them based on 'pragmatism' because Emacs/vim exists.

What I'm trying to say is, people remember when you try to improve on things, even if you don't quite make it. Nobody remembers the guy commenting on a thread shooting it down. Decide which one you want to be.

>Based upon momentum I believe the Electron based ecosystem has already won, yes.

Based upon momentum Nicky Minaj is better than John Coltrane. So there's that.

I think it’s fair enough to say that, from the perspective of community momentum and extension momentum, they’ve “won”, sure. It’s also fair to say that in many cases a user’s text editor doesn’t need quite that breadth of extensibility and/or feature-richness, and that winning that war (or battle) isn’t really all that important to at least some subset of users.

That’s where Xi fits. It’s saying “these things we don’t get from other editors are important”. Users are free to decide which feature or attributes are most important to them. At the end of the day, users win!

What exactly does 'won' mean to you in this context? Other than the fact you're tying it to some vaguely positive notion around momentum, it's not at all obvious what claim you're making.

Here, you can have your cake (electron) and eat it too (xi-core) https://github.com/acheronfail/xi-electron

Never actually seen anyone use Atom, too slow everyone on HN said.

10 years ago Eclipse was most popular editor and was considered the best. Java, C++, PHP. Aptana, IBM IDEs and many more. And now it is pretty much gone.