>I don't begin to believe this statement, not least of which because 99% of what you can do with vim or emacs is make vim or emacs do what you want by heavily scripting them. That eliminates most "modern editors" right off the bat.

Every single "modern editor" I'm talking about is scriptable, and they're scriptable in languages that are easier to code in than vimscript (which is infamously awful) or Lisp. Some are even scriptable in positively awesome languages.

Not sure what "modern editor" you're talking about. See:

Notepad++:

http://sourceforge.net/p/notepad-plus/discussion/1290590

Visual Studio: You can record a macro and get code that you can then edit, adding loops and logic and such, and then play back the macro. Or you can extend it in an arbitrary way:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/ff718165.aspx

Visual Slickedit: Half of the app is written in its own custom C-like scripting language. Similar to Visual Studio, you can record a macro and edit the resulting source code, so you don't have to guess how to start creating a script.

TextAdept: Scriptable in Lua.

http://foicica.com/textadept/

TextMate: "Plug-able Through Your Favorite Scripting Language"

http://macromates.com/

Sublime Text: "Sublime Text has a powerful, Python based plugin API. Along with the API, it comes with a built in Python console to interactively experiment in real time." -- This one I haven't used, so I can't be CERTAIN that you can write-and-use scripts immediately and trivially, but it certainly sounds like it.

http://www.sublimetext.com/

NEdit: "NEdit is extensible through a C-like macro language"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEdit

SCIte: "In addition, the Lua programming language is embedded in SciTE, allowing the user further customization. One can write Lua scripts that have access to the contents of the buffer and the Scintilla API."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SciTE

I've been clicking on random ones in the WikiPedia article on text editors [1], and except for the editors that "come with the OS" (Notepad, etc.), every one I checked had scripting. I actually clicked on SciTE to give a counter-example, since SciTE is mostly a proof-of-concept for the Scintilla editor library.

I would have to say, given the ubiquity of scripting languages in editors, that you haven't LOOKED for scripting in other editors. Which is FINE, but You Do Not Know Of What You Speak (TM).

Even if you can point to some that don't have scripting, it doesn't matter. Plenty do, and scripting is important to me as well. The crucial thing for me is the ability to quickly record and play back a macro; I wouldn't use any editor long term without that feature.

You really can't win this argument. I've traded blows with many extremely experienced vim users, and for every transform that's easier in vim than in another editor, I can come up with three more transforms easier in one or more editors I know. And the real win of using a modern editor is that the core keys (arrows, shift-arrow to select, control-arrow to jump by word, etc.) also work in thousands of other GUI apps, so you don't have to mode shift to be reasonably productive in a Firefox text box, for example.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_text_editors