[sandisk5]

> It seems like they've managed to starve out a good chunk of innovation on this front.

If you look the way magit dialogs are handled, they're quite innovative and could be useful in many other contexts (like shell commands). Magit itself has many other innovative UI approaches. EMMS/gnus/notmuch/twittering-mode have innovative UIs of their own. Also look at spacemacs and the things its doing with guide-key for more UI innovation.

Being able to search (C-s) or filter (occur) almost any text on the screen (including UI like button names) is very nice, and something I miss when in Atom (like the Settings tab where one can only search things the creator decided to add a search field for).

There is a ton of innovation in vim and emacs these days, mostly in new packages. I'm glad we have them (and Atom and others) exploring different approaches.

There are plenty of gedit-like editors with standard user interfaces.