Why would anyone use pinkie for modifier keys? Nowadays you can reconfigure positions of CTRL and Meta and Shift to your taste. I happily us Emacs without ever stretching my fingers, because all these keys sit happily under my thumbs (literally).
"First you need to buy a custom keyboard that puts all the modifier keys under your thumbs" is not a very enticing pitch for a text editor. Doubly so for those of us on laptops where the idea of carrying around an external keyboard is a non-starter.