Interesting. For me the killer feature of Emacs is its customizability. That's not quite the right word, because Emacs's integration with ELisp lets you do things that almost nothing else does. The ability to modify existing functions live is central to its power, and the boundary between "The Editor" and "Extensions" is extremely fuzzy.
Xi seems to take a harder approach to customization, which means that customizers will always be subject to the limitations of the plug-in interface. There will always be a hard boundary between "The Editor" and "Extensions", and I believe that will ultimately limit its usefulness.
I agree with you. Having tasted the emacs way, I'm constantly frustrated (actually I just simply avoid) by interactions with software that isn't so inspectable, and malleable. Still, never blocking user input is a respectable goal for an editor, and a design philosophy I wish emacs would seriously pursue. I would not mind a "feature" freeze on emacs for the remainder of the decade if it meant absolute responsive editing with asynchronous operations.
Emacs customizability is something rare. I had the pleasure to run QBASIC and Turbo Pascal 7 not long ago; and was amazed at the capabilities and speed of these old IDEs. Yet, they were locked. TP7, which is an epic[1] thing, made me feel sad, because the editing features are so basic, almost crippling (no block selection); you physically feel how you miss emacs, where anything is a few LoC away.
[1] text based multifile edition with overlapping windows (including .. ascii window shadowing), invisible compilation times (on a Pentium2), exhaustive help system; all in 800KB.
> you physically feel how you miss emacs, where anything is a few LoC away
That is my problem with IDEs, in a nutshell. There is the running joke that Emacs is a decent operating system in want of a decent editor. The same can be said - more strongly - about Eclipse or Visual Studio.
Some things these IDEs do spectacularly well, for sure, but when it comes to basic text editing, I keep thinking how easy this or that would be in emacs. ;-|
Same, and I started in the Eclipse fad, with eclipse plugin being a thing, before I knew how to program emacs (beside default config). The day I realize how general lisp was and how dynamic emacs was I had to pause for a minute.
Last winter I had to use Eclipse (for scala), one day of mild use trigger nasty wrist pain (I play music, I'm used to pushing the mechanics, that was more). And people say emacs causes RSI ;)
Also the Eclipse crowd is completely off the user side. It's all about tech. Microsoft might be better, I didn't use VS since ages. IDEA is said to be really great at ergonomics. But rarely someone brings a lot to the table. (the only recent thing I noticed was parinfer, ambitious and useful). Also people underestimate what a elisp can do when used correctly. See yasnippet, of Fuco litable.el.
I don't even remap. I think my hands ended up morphing into an emacs stockholm syndrom. Or maybe music did it before that. Still I was surprised that Eclipse would revive such painful sensations.
Modifying existing functions sounds like a recipe for plugin incompatibilities. Vim doesn't let you modify any built-in functions but it seems to be just as powerful.
Indeed, architecturally it's just asking for trouble. However it also lets user extend the system in ways that aren't previously planned for. Pros and cons...
Xi seems to take a harder approach to customization, which means that customizers will always be subject to the limitations of the plug-in interface. There will always be a hard boundary between "The Editor" and "Extensions", and I believe that will ultimately limit its usefulness.