Have you ever thought about why Vim is still used by many people for more than 20 years and did not fade out?

Reputations

Some people says:

I do not understand why there are people continue to use a fossil-like text editor.

Certainly, Vim is character-based text editor. if Vim was same as it was 20 years ago, your opinion would be correct. But you have to know that Vim is changing still now.

In the fact

In the fact, Vim improved many features without stopping.

Version5

Add some GUIs including Win32 GUI
Python/Perl infterface
And many useful features

Version6

Support UTF-8
Vertical split
Netrw
Server-Client
Quickfix
And many useful features

Version7

Spell checking
Support MzScheme
omni-completion
Tab pages
vimgrep
And many useful features

Version8

Asynchronous I/O support, channels and jobs, timers
Partial function, Lambda/Closure function
Packaging
DirectX drawing
GTK+ 3 support

Recently, Vim add new feature:terminal. It is possible to open terminal window in Vim. Run the shell, watching log files, sending e-mail, start Emacs on the :terminal. This feature gave us a lot of possibilities.

This feature was noted as not-good-design for Vim in :help design-not. But the text is written in 20 years ago. Can you say that the design written in 20 years ago is always correct even in nowadays? Bram Moolenaar who is author of Vim decided to change the doc.

Vim is not a shell or an Operating System. It does provide a terminal window, in which you can run a shell or debugger. E.g. to be able to do this over an ssh connection. But if you don't need a text editor with that it is out of scope (use something like screen or tmux instead).

Interestingly, support for :terminal includes Windows. (FYI: I implemented windows :terminal, yay!)

You can use :terminal on Windows GUI/CUI both to run Windows command-prompt. This doesn't depend on Cygwin/msys2. Just require winpty.dll and winpty-agent.exe, for the description, see the bottom of :help Terminal-mode. You can use one window in Vim as if it is command prompt. To know more features of terminal, see :help terminal.

Contributors

And you've better to know how may contributors send patches to vim-dev, we are discussing to fix bugs and add new features. For example, do you know how many commits in this october 2017?

This include adding features and fixing bugs. Can you say that development status of Vim is not active? Vim will continue to change and probably will not become a fossil.

Blog

Why Vim does not fade out?

Yasuhiro Matsumoto