Comment by rplevy

I think the reason why that is not likely to catch on is that most Lisp hackers enjoy using an editor that can itself be hacked in Lisp. Also, emacs is one of the most stable pieces of software in history. It will probably live forever and continue to evolve.

Also, I think that Lisp isn't really suffering. As far as I can tell there has been increasing interest in Lisp. Even without that trend continuing, Lisp is such a masterpiece (and it continues to develop with new innovations), that it is almost definitely here to stay, regardless of whether it becomes a trendy language to use again. The advantages in performance (say SBCL's for example) and expressiveness over other dynamic languages like Ruby and Python afford Lisp developers an actual advantage, as opposed to a merely perceived one.