EDIT: why the downvote? Not trolling, just genuinely sad that with today's hard drive sizes it's not a given that Emacs is available virtually everywhere, like vi or nano are.
A modern, straightforward CLI editor would help many people.
Isn't that what a true beginner would use anyway instead of the terminal version?
Which is still nearly useless without knowing of lots of Emacs arcana.
I know you can activate those keybinding in Emacs, but then none of the documentation you find about keyboard shortcuts will apply to you.
The fact that many places support emacs keybindings (like MATLAB or IntelliJ) are an indication of how many programmers are used to those keybindings, but beginning or aspiring users most certainly are not.
Don't get me wrong. I love Emacs. I use Emacs everywhere, and for everything. But I know that the default behaviour and keybindings were a hurdle to overcome when I first got to know Emacs, and it took me time and effort to get comfortable within the editor.
But yes, it takes a time to get used to. But that's matter of familiarity.
https://gist.github.com/cben/ada7675ab9aa14000a1a50eae398611...
-- emacs user for >15yr, tired of motor context switching. (Terminal Ctrl+Shift+X/C/V vs it opening devtools in Chrome is bad enough...)
I would suggest it is easy to use, mainly because it can be customised pretty heavily to work your way, it just isn't easy to learn which is why I've stuck with other options.
It's not actually hard to learn. I reckon vi is harder to learn, but at least with vi you know you have to do things differently. Emacs is much closer to other common editors, just a little bit different, and that can make it surprisingly frustrating, with the emphasis on surprise.
Nano really gets the job done for people who have no clue about editor usage. If you only need to edit a few lines in a file once a month, immediate accessibility Nano provides is more valuable than powerful features that take time to memorize and absorb into muscle memory.
Emacs, Vim are for people who use Nano enough to start feeling uncomfortable.
Vim lists `:q' and `:help' prominently in the middle of the screen when you first start it. If you try to exit with C-c (in Normal mode), or C-c C-c (in Insert), you get this message:
"Type :quit<Enter> to exit Vim"
Only when you start it by itself intentionally, not when you want to edit something and your $EDITOR is not set, then you end up in vim without an idea, how to quit.
I remember (in the mid-90s) making another telnet session and killing vi. Swearing in the process. Yes, I later learned the :q! command.
The problem is that some of these servers are already stripped down - it's even worse as we're moving to containers.
Emacs, even the non-gui version, still requires about a dozen dependencies, at least on most Debian and RHEL based servers. And each time I install it, I get some bad feeling in the back of my mind, wondering if I'm the one who opened a big hole into our infrastructure because I just wouldn't learn vim. :)
And yes I know about Tramp mode from my local machine, and other tricks, but sometimes it's easier to just install the damn editor locally.
I don't have any objection to packaging emacs with the OS. Actually, it comes with macOS, although without graphical support (/usr/bin/emacs).
Because MB don't matter. It's about the experience it offers (e.g. as a better nano for early users) or doesn't offer.
Nobody cares if Emacs is only 3MB more -- it's not an argument for "just use Emacs then".
I beg your pardon, but since Linux is increasingly used nowadays in quite resource constrained embedded devices, MB definitely does matter. (No, I don't claim that the individual 10 MB is very much on most devices that are actually capable of running linux. But once you go down that road and start having something else bloated than just the text editor, you are a few hundred MBs poorer in no time, and that is a lot.)
https://blog.filippo.io/shrink-your-go-binaries-with-this-on...
How are those relevant in our context?
Most of those "constrained embedded devices" (from smartphones to IoT and set top boxes) don't run terminals and editors anyway. And those that do belong to a niche, and those people can install whatever they want, be it nano, micro or whatever fits.
If you're concerned about the programmers of those "constrained embedded devices", that might want to ssh and edit something on them, then those programmers don't use nano anyway, so this doesn't concern them either.