You realize that you're asking this in a discussion of a tool that is intended to be installed out of the box on Microsoft Windows, where vi is not installed out of the box, right? Your "everywhere" doesn't include the primary use case for what is being headlined here.

There's an underlying assumption about "target audience for this editor" that you both share, that others, I suspect quite a few others, do not.

For starters, there's your assumption that there is "syntax" to be highlighted. Not every text file is something written in a computer programming language.

You should raise that as an issue. If things like that get in early enough, they get heard.

And it wasn't just similar. It was literally the same. EDIT.COM simply started QBASIC up with a special flag. One could just run QBASIC with the flag. As I said at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44037509 , I actually did, just for kicks.

The opposite, if anything. Very little was written against the old semantics, with most of the time the supplied C library providing what was needed, and so the code that did rely upon old semantics barely got exercised. A little-used shim that had been broken wasn't noticed, in other words, until just the right combination of circumstances got the shim being used on a platform where it would break.

What there are piles of, are softwares that reinvent the C library, all too often in little bits of conditionally-compiled code that have either been reinvented or nicked from some old C library and sit unused in every platform that that application is nowadays ported to. Every time that I see a build log dutifully informing me that it has checked for <string.h> or some other thing that has been standard for 35 years I wonder (a) why that is thought to be necessary in 2025, and (b) what sort of shims would get used if the check ever failed.

You are looking at the wrong legislation. Coincidentally, or perhaps not, Ashton Schottler was discussing the E.U. right to repair legislation this last weekend.

* https://youtube.com/watch?v=K_lAdaecL30&t=484