Yes. They are bound to be discovered and re-discovered by every generation. They are the kind of tools that get the job done. There's also still a lot to be discovered about those editors themselves.

Besides, to quote Wikipedia:

EMACS: initial release: 1976, 34–35 years ago

Vim: initial release 1991, 19–20 years ago

vi: was written by Bill Joy in 1976 (as extension of `ex' editor)

The debacle's been raging for way longer than 20 years.

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On the other hand, if you want something more modern: http://man.cat-v.org/plan_9/1/acme

The EMACS package for TECO on ITS isn't an ancestor of modern GNU emacs, which began as a rewrite (based on Gosling's Unix emacs) in 1984. They are both "emacs" in the sense that they are modeless screen editors that share the same default keystrokes.

Really GNU emacs is related to ITS emacs in the same way that vim is to BSD vi: it's a cleaner and much more powerful reimagining of the original that shares some interface details but no implementation.

We had a programming intern a couple years ago, he was doing some Python stuff for us. One day he comes to me all excited about this awesome editor he found that was x-platform and had syntax highlighting for everything and was scriptable. I like editors so I asked him what it was..."It's called Vim!".

The editor I had been using for years. :)

Yeah, I went from Geany to vim for python. And after installing the LaTeX packages, I couldn't go back.

Also, 20 years for now people will still engage in arguments about which is better - it's the ultimate flame war :)

Yes, and the rest of us will still wonder why.