> Basically the same reason why very few people use Emacs or Vim nowadays.
There are more Vim and Emacs users now than ever before, because there are now more computer programmers than ever before. There are just a lot more people that use other editors/IDEs. Just like there were more Visual Basic users than Emacs/Vim users in the 1990s. The Visual Basic/IDE people are irrelevant as far as Emacs/Vim/Unix/Free Software is concerned because they are unaware of what Free Software actually is (they do have a lot of misconceptions, ones that they really like to flame about on Internet forums), do not understand why they should ever contribute to Free Software, and even if they wanted to do so, they do not have the skills to contribute to Unix/Free Software. Just like all the Visual Basic chair warmers disappeared leaving behind their shitty cobbled-together software, so too will the current generation of people that do not have the capacity or interest to figure out Vim/Emacs/Unix, to be replaced by the next wave of popular garbage software. In another twenty years, more people than ever will still be using Vim/Emacs.
I personally know someone with the belief that climate change is a political conspiracy. Any evidence to support climate change just points to a bigger "cover-up" and validates their beliefs. Almost always this is not an isolated belief but a pattern of thinking, and the person holds similar conspiracy theory beliefs about other issues. This is not a political left/right issue (the person I happen to know happens to be a left-wing conspiracy theorist). This is an issue of mild paranoid psychosis that is not being recognized and treated seriously because the symptoms are not very disturbing to others, and the people suffering from it happen to be relatively high-functioning. Eventually as these people age the symptoms get worse and they end up driving those close to them away.
That is because almost all of the giant Redwood and Giant Sequoia trees in the Pacific Northwest were destroyed by logging by the start of the 1920s. Darius and Tabitha May Kinsey's Kinsey, Photographer: A Half Century of Negatives is a book of Darius Kinsey's photographs of logging camps in Washington and Oregon in the 19th century. The camps were inland and there are many photographs of the giant trees growing in the mountains. The giant tree forests did not stop at the US border, and BC had the same logging boom in the 19th century. It is disingenuous to claim that new growth coniferous and Boreal forest is the only thing BC has ever had, when most of the BC giant tree forests were destroyed only a few generations ago.
There are more Vim and Emacs users now than ever before, because there are now more computer programmers than ever before. There are just a lot more people that use other editors/IDEs. Just like there were more Visual Basic users than Emacs/Vim users in the 1990s. The Visual Basic/IDE people are irrelevant as far as Emacs/Vim/Unix/Free Software is concerned because they are unaware of what Free Software actually is (they do have a lot of misconceptions, ones that they really like to flame about on Internet forums), do not understand why they should ever contribute to Free Software, and even if they wanted to do so, they do not have the skills to contribute to Unix/Free Software. Just like all the Visual Basic chair warmers disappeared leaving behind their shitty cobbled-together software, so too will the current generation of people that do not have the capacity or interest to figure out Vim/Emacs/Unix, to be replaced by the next wave of popular garbage software. In another twenty years, more people than ever will still be using Vim/Emacs.