I agree with that wholeheartedly. Don’t get me wrong—I love emacs and I’ll be the first to talk your ear off about it.
But it’s a hobby, and not necessarily worth the time investment compared with other editors, if you’re looking for something that “just works” and has all the modern features.
I even got syntax highlighting for patches and wrote some lisp to link up notmuch search results to gnus- so I can search for an e-mail and find the whole thread easily.
Of course, I could have just started evolution and been done, but this stuff is fun!
At my last job, I was forced to use PyCharm. Fine an IDE it probably is, I hated every second of it. Within 3 days I ditched it for Emacs.
Come on. „CUA mode“ exists since the 90s. ;)
Jokes aside, Emacs UX is just completely different to anything modern. Computer users not enlightened by Emacsen try to press Esc to get out of trouble, assume scrolling doesn't move the cursor, etc. Chorded keybindings are a mind-blow, and they have their own further pitfalls too.
I either got used to Emacs behaviours, or find them superior (can't tell which one) but frankly I think they might be a big deterrent. For new users, it must be like getting into a car where all the controls are different. Brake and accelerator swapped, clutch is hand-operated (and woe to you if you've only driven automatic), stems are swapped, and some vital controls are operated by pressing buttons with the top of your head. Computer programs of the past 20 years have some basic common behaviours that are almost synonymous with basic IT skills, and Emacs diverges in many of them.
I adopted Emacs in the relative modernity of 2012, when I joined a mostly-airgapped Linux environment and needed a power editor. I persevered and grew to love Emacs, but frankly if I could have downloaded VS Code or Pycharm, I probably would have done.
That actually does work, if you press ESC three times. It’s a special case in Emacs, added just to make it easier for people who hammer the ESC key to abort.
True, though, that it gets me out of the mini-buffer, same as C-g. I didn't know that works - nice.
Btw, here's another thing. How many times as a beginner was I stuck in the mini-buffer and had no idea what's going on? The new editors have some kind of command palette, which is vaguely similar, but I don't think you can get stuck in it.
It’s in the menu bar, under “Options” → “Use CUA Keys (Cut/Paste with C-x/C-c/C-v)”, beside an on/off checkbox. How could it possibly be made to be any easier to find and understand (except to make it enabled by default)?
There shouldn't be any goddamn high places!
You have to meet your users where they are, otherwise you won't have users. For desktop applications, that means using the standard interface conventions and shortcuts for common operations.