Speaking of vim, just a reminder that @antirez made a terminal based text editor in pure C with no dependencies, not even ncurses, in under 1000 lines of code, complete with search feature, and customizable syntax highlighting for variable number of languages.

Lots of people have forked it and are actively making it their very own editor. Sure, none of them may ever take off and become a new emacs or vim competitor. Or maybe they will. Let's not discount innovation.

Plus it's amazing to me that to make a full fledged terminal editor, almost all you really need is the ability to read from stdin and write to stdout. Only a tiny little bit of glue C code is needed (for handling signals like SIGWINCH, or for setting or unsetting raw mode in the terminal), but almost the entire rest of it can be written in, say, Lua.