Switching costs of various kinds of software

I've been thinking about switching costs of software ever since I saw this footnote in a blog post about text editors.

• Spaced repetition software is pretty easy to switch, because the old SRS you abandon will gradually have fewer and fewer reviews, so you can just add your new content to the new SRS and it will basically be a "soft switch" to the new one.
• Text editors are unique in that the format is universal (because it's either plain text or controlled by programming languages rather than the text editor itself). There are however "soft" lockin via formats, e.g. a programming language with a lot of boilerplate will be difficult to program in without fancy autocompletion.
  • Some reasons mentioned in the Roben Kleene article: most text editors have the same keybindings, and so you can pretty much start using it without reading a manual.
• Note-taking apps are kinda hard to switch because your notes might be in incompatible formats between different programs. otoh, i think some ppl want to declare bankruptcy on their notes, and having a "fresh start" is appealing to them, so they are more open to switching.
• It's super easy to switch between terminal emulators if you use tmux/screen; you can just detach, close the old terminal, then reattach in the new terminal. You don't need to close any programs or anything.
  • there are other "enabling" software like virtual machine software (which makes it easy to shop around between different operating systems)
• Any kind of social software (e.g. social networking sites, instant messaging) is hard to switch because it requires also convincing other people to switch with you.
• Software that promises "sane defaults" are easier to switch to.
• For operating systems, it really depends on what kinds of things you do on the computer. If all you do is stuff in the browser, then it is easy to switch to pretty much anything (ignoring things like installation difficulty for some more obscure Linux distros).