Kakoune too. But if a project focuses on a novel editing model and not some other aspect of an editor, then implementing it inside Emacs might be the best approach.

If implemented inside Emacs, then it composes with the rest of its package ecosystem. Kakoune, Helix, etc. are somewhat set back by having to reproduce functionality equivalent to Magit, Org, LSP mode, and so on in order to be on equal footing for many users.

Evil, Meow, and God mode seem to show that Emacs is a good platform for such experimentation.

I don't have a lot of experience with Emacs, let alone evil (and none at all with meow or god). But my experience with it was that evil felt distinctly.. hacky? For example, Evil felt like it interfered with selecting restarts in Sly.

I've had similar issues with VscodeVim being weird in VSC. Ultimately the text editor is so core to a text editor (duh) that deeply modifying it is bound to give a worse experience than implementing it from scratch, even if it does give you a lot of nice stuff 'for free'.

> But my experience with it was that evil felt distinctly.. hacky?

Honestly that was my experience with all of Emacs, not just evil. I tried Doom Emacs a while ago, and while Doom does a great job at abstracting a lot of that hackiness away, whenever I tried to configure something myself it just felt like the entire Emacs ecosystem is based on random hacked-together 10000 line elisp scripts with 3 GitHub stars which abuse some weird undocumented legacy parts of Emacs. Basically everything except a few famous big packages (eg. Org, Magit, etc.) felt very weird to use.

Kinda surprising considering how comprehensive the Neovim ecosystem feels compared to Emacs', despite it also being a very niche editor