I use all 3 (or all 4). • Emacs for most everything … 35 years and counting. • IntelliJ for Scala, except when I have to do major surgery, then I can do it must faster (and keep the patient alive) if I go into Emacs, do the major work, then go back to IntelliJ to see if everything still seems Ok. Emacs / lsp-mode can do that too, but IntelliJ is faster at the type checking stuff and some auto-completion. • DrRacket for most of my Racket stuff (love the arrows), but I go into Emacs when I have major surgery to do, especially on a bunch of files. What I can do with macros and Emacs functions in Emacs is basically what makes me leave (temporarily) both IntelliJ and DrRacket. If I’ve got to get a whole bunch of stuff done in the next 15–30 minutes, Emacs is my friend. I do love that the people who wrote DrRacket are the same people who know all the ins-and-outs of Racket down to the subatomic particles. • Vim for some weird reasons.

I hit Enter before I should have. Those Vim weird reasons are: • I wrote a tiny piece of vi back in the late 1970s (paren/bracket/brace matching). • When I worked on DoD machines 15–25 years ago, pre–9/11 I could run Emacs as root and control the world (benevolently), after 9/11 I could ssh into machines that were pretty locked down and only had vi. Productivity definitely suffered. • IntelliJ Emacs-mode is minimal, vi-mode is complete. • I try to be sympathetic to how the other side thinks. • I’m getting better at vi using it daily at work, but when I’m in Emacs I really fly.

I think your second point about vi / vim is a big reason why it has survived. We would probably all be using ed if vi wasn’t everywhere.

Emacs has a near-complete emulation layer for vim (evil), and I’ve switched to that from pure Vim. Especially for lisps, I can’t seem to get my Meta key working in the terminal with Vim (for plugins like vim-sexp) so that’s a bit of a problem

@samdphillips I remember using ed. And TECO.

The main thing I noticed was that the arguments for all sides mostly seem to be essentially “this is the one I have already spent a bunch of time learning, and I don’t expect sufficient benefit from learning another to try to switch”

Or, “I can do X very quickly in my preferred editor, but don’t know how to do it in the others, and thus assume they aren’t capable of it”