"Accessible" is a fine goal, everything else being equal, but for something I spend so much time in, I look for maximum potential power in my editor.
Compare graphical desktops and the Unix command line.
Again, I love emacs and I’m very effective in it with my own configuration, but it’s practically unusable by default. I’ve never seen a serious emacs user without a heavy customised emacs. And I’ve never seen another emacs user whose config I would be nearly able to use :D
I can totally see why people like editors with sane defaults.
As someone who has tried to be an Emacs user off and on over the past two decades: "yes, this."
I'm reasonably comfortable in both Vim and Emacs, but the reality is that every time I try to make a move to be a Serious Full-Time (Vim|Emacs) User, I find myself spending days trying to get either editor up to the point I was previously at in Sublime Text or VS Code. And I never make it. Never, never, never. Plugins or modes conflict with one another in non-obvious (to me) ways, and Emacs in particular tends to present a "here are a half-dozen ways to solve your problem, none of which will actually work with your configuration" issue. Meanwhile, everyone and their brother has a New! Amazing! Distribution! of the editor. My last couple of attempts to get into either one led me into a nightmare of "go pure vanilla and painstakingly build things from scratch, even though you don't actually know what the pieces you need are" vs. "start with Evil Awesome Space Prelude Vundle." And then, I can finally install the Elixir plugin! Wait, you also need alchemist.el and web-mode.el and probably need to edit your .emacs, excuse me, init.el, except maybe .spacemacs?, and now choose which of the half-dozen autocompletion systems to use, but OH MY GOD NOT THAT ONE YOU FOOL NOW YOU HAVE TO START OVER
And then I go back to one of those Terrible Awful GUI editors and get work done.
So yeah, I can’t really tell you it will be worth it productivity wise to learn Emacs, but for me it has gotten to the point that configuring it is a lot of fun and sort of replaces hobby programming projects for me.
(Ironically, I spend most of my professional editing time -- which involves writing documentation in Markdown, not coding -- in BBEdit, because while there are a lot of coding editors that do more than it does, it has a few features for text slicing and dicing that I just haven't seen duplicated anywhere else.)
Sublime's project goto functionality is simply unbeatable, it is faster than any Vim plugin I've ever used, it starts up faster than Emacs, it requires _no_ configuration to be a great text editor, it's the text-editor embodiment of easy-to-learn, hard-to-master.
Emacs is really something you need to actively learn, while you can just pick up Sublime and use it effectively within the first minute of opening it.
Why do people open very large files with a text editor? If it's a data file, you should grep/head/tail.
They're ok when there are no alternatives like during SSH session but I've given up customizing after 10 years to make them act like any of the latter ones.
Why would I pay for IntelliJ if I could or someone had already made easy to use plugin to just make them act like modern editors?
Vim just has a lot less going on under the hood by default and is built for this.
In short, I guess I'm agreeing with your original post. Vim is just on another level when it comes to performance versus other editors so it's kind of unfair to pit them together.
That comment is _begging_ for a source. Whose general opinion?
The major reason back then was TextMate's and then Sublime's far superior support for editting files containing multiple syntaxes. While mmm-mode for Emacs eased the pain a while back then, it made Emacs slow down to a crawl sometimes and TextMate/then Sublime were also a lot easier to customize with regards to embedded languages without having to write elisp code all the time....
Sure emacs is great and it has 10000x more features than anything else but ask yourself how much of them you really need and how convenient Emacs is at the end of the day ? I asked this myself and i came to the conclusion that i was better off a more recent editor. ST has a similar philosophy like vim and emacs and thats why i choose it.
Recently im trying VS Code but the performance is still somehow not fully convincing me.
Reading the recent discussions about the need to create commercial entities around open source projects, it occurred to me that Emacs has maybe suffered from not ever being commercialised. It is clearly the best code editor (very few people who master it ever leave it), but its steep learning curve and unreconstructed GUI mean that it remains inaccessible to too many developers. Maybe if a company was created around the product its sales, marketing and documentation would improve, and more people would use it.
Sublime work well across the main OS, live in their world, have no funky weird crazy ways to work (ie: work as expected without retraining for that funky weird crazy sub-world).
---- P.D: I not dislike the terminal, and wish all OS have not 3 competing GUIS (Web,Native, Terminal) but just 2 (so a terminal editor is a native editor, a native paint app is a native terminal app) but that is a pipe dream because the terminal is stuck in the past.