On reflection, it probably explains why I've used Emacs for my whole career but never really got into any of the elisp customization or other advanced features. I still base my work in the shell (and filesystem) and launch ephemeral Emacs processes rather than living in it as some folks do. I never got interested in IDE functions like controlling compilers nor debuggers from within Emacs.

I never even wanted Emacs to split a terminal window into smaller "screens". I learned the key combo to abort that, much like I learned only enough vi to kill off an unintended launch. But, I do get a lot of mileage out of the XEmacs "frames", i.e. independent X windows all fronting the same set of editing buffers. But I also have terminal windows alongside that to do all the other things from the shell that some people prefer to do from inside the editor...

around 1998, I was working at a regional ISP, my main workstation was a sparc 5, but I had picked up a conversion box from ps-2 to sparc so I could use a Microsoft natural keyboard. emacs was still considered "eight megs and constantly swapping", but I had 96mb of memory in my sparc, and was able to run it.

Microsoft paid a visit to our isp, trying to make a deal, saw no windows anywhere but were excited to see my Microsoft keyboard. they asked about my computer, I told them I was running solaris on a sparc, and they were excited to ask me if I had run internet explorer, that they had just released for solaris. I looked at them horrified, and said, "I only have 96mb of ram in this, I can't run internet explorer!" - but I was able to run multiple windows of emacs, many terminals, a window manager, and netscape (just not the web server, because we ran apache)