Vim does not use the Unix philosophy. It is an Amiga program ported to Unix, designed along the lines of Emacs, which also does not use the Unix philosophy. You would think he would have noticed that his text editor was a domain where he wasn't applying the superior Unix philosophy.
I'm not convinced that the Unix philosophy doesn't apply to image and video editing, but certainly we haven't seen an example (aside from filters, which work well in things like netpbm and Khoros, but I mean for actual interactive drawing and editing.) And certainly the performance cost of the Unix approach was infeasible in 1988, when Thomas Knoll wrote Photoshop. Still, the tree-structured pipeline structure of CAD models in FreeCAD, SolidWorks, and CATIA suggests that it might be a productive approach with enough work.
We have seen the Vim philosophy applied to video editing, with great success; that's Blender.
I'm not convinced that the Unix philosophy doesn't apply to image and video editing, but certainly we haven't seen an example (aside from filters, which work well in things like netpbm and Khoros, but I mean for actual interactive drawing and editing.) And certainly the performance cost of the Unix approach was infeasible in 1988, when Thomas Knoll wrote Photoshop. Still, the tree-structured pipeline structure of CAD models in FreeCAD, SolidWorks, and CATIA suggests that it might be a productive approach with enough work.
We have seen the Vim philosophy applied to video editing, with great success; that's Blender.